How big is the Internet?

Thu Aug 15 02:03:37 UTC 2013

On Wed, Aug 14, 2013 at 10:10 AM, Alex <dreamwaverfx at yahoo.com> wrote:

> Current size is HUGE and growing at a phenomenal speed.
> Public IP networks...just look at ARIN, RIPE,etc and see how many IPs
> there are left.
> Private networks and private IPs...well that is anyone's guess.
>
> There are no estimates because everything changes rather fast and noone
> can keep up with all this stuff.
> The only thing you could have a really good estimate are the resources
> used by your company and thats about it.
>

Your best bet for estimating the true size of the Internet would probably
 require access to Google, Bing, et al.  search engine  client access
datasets,   and  number of files / sites  crawled datasets;   I wouldn't be
surprised if they already had this data -- and use cookies as a sieve to
accurately separate higher-volume single users from  multiple NAT'ed users.

Predict the average client's search volume, and infer a predicted number of
NAT'ed users  per IP accessing search over time.

Then enumerate every domain name registered in every single gTLD and ccTLD,
 and count the number of uniques -- excluding ones with nameservers listed
that are used for  /dev/null  domains  which just display advertising.

Is the number of network nodes on the internet more interesting than the
number of  exabytes of  unique public data  able to be downloaded.....  or
the number of SD cards  and amount of download time required to backup the
internet? :)

--
-JH