off-topic: historical query concerning the Internet bubble

Jorge Amodio jmamodio at gmail.com
Fri Aug 6 12:23:44 UTC 2010


As you may recall (because you have been part of it) the 1995-2000 was
a period of major consolidation in the ISP industry, metrics were hard
to obtain and the ones available were hard to believe.

Due to the consolidation of many small networks from various ISPs (I
remember that in my former life we engulfed several of the surviving
post NSFNet regionals), almost all the big pipes of those ISPs were up
to the choking point, then when the time came to move all those pipes
to a better backbone and exchange points, and in the process make them
bigger, traffic started to increase dramatically, accompanied as well
by a decrease in packet loss and delays.

The consolidation also helped to move mom & pop configuration of
stacked us robitics modems to much modern, efficient and reliable
aggregation technologies and architectures on the access side, add
ISDN, DSL, cable, etc.

Not sure how to include it as a variable, but at least in the US the
Telecom Act of 1996 also changed the playing field, CLECs and other
new telecom companies were born.

On top of that, in that period there was also a big increase in
international capacity, some connections (particularly south and
central america) were switching from satellite to fiber, many
developing countries (some of them were just coming out of highly
monopolized and regulated telecom services) were able to have access
to better international connections, plus all the traffic growth
driven from the application side, plus the contribution of dramatic
growth in shared and dedicated hosting services.

I don't recall or have at hand at this time the exact figure, but I'd
agree with you that at some time it looked like a ~10x thing whit some
spurts of much higher growth.

Cheers
Jorge




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