Crackdowns don't slow Internet piracy

Thu Jul 15 04:36:26 UTC 2004

> Fergie (Paul Ferguson)
> "The popularity of file-sharing is costing the largest
> Internet service providers $10 million per year each
> in bandwidth and network maintenance costs, CacheLogic
> said."

$10 million a year for the largest ISPs is a drop in the sea; _if_ the
figure is accurate (sounds reasonable to me) what's the point anyway?
The largest ISPs serve directly or indirectly millions of users that
each pay $20/mo which is $240/yr, 10 million bucks a year is nothing.

> "It estimates Internet users around the globe freely
> exchange a staggering 10 petabytes -- or 10 million
> gigabytes -- of data, much of it in the form of
> copyright-protected songs, movies, software and video
> games."

This sounds a reasonable figure to me if it's per day traffic. Ballpark
figures are:

- Common estimates are that there are 30 to 40 million Americans sharing
files, less than 100 million worldwide.

- My personal estimate is that at any given time some 15 million are
on-line (a few large networks have 1+ million simultaneous users, plus
some other with numbers in the hundreds of thousands).

- 10 petabytes per day breaks out to an average of 60kbit/s per
simultaneous user, which seems reasonable to me; some still have dial-up
but broadband is widely deployed, NTM the few that operate a high-end
P4T PC with a GE NIC connected to an OC-48 (someone checks my math
please?).

Michel.