Questioning the coming Internet clog by Ed Gubbins

One of the nation’s top authorities on global Internet traffic growth says his latest data show no reason to fear network capacity shortages, as traffic growth may even be slightly decelerating.

Updating data collected from Internet exchanges around the world, professor Andrew Odlyzko, director of the University of Minnesota’sInterdisciplinary Digital Technology Center,reported late last week that Internet traffic rates in the US and globally are continuing to grow at a rate between 50% and 60% (largely unchanged from recent years) -- rapid growth that nonetheless belies dire predictions of an escalation that would clog today’s networks.

“There is still not [sic] sign of the threatened deluge that was supposed to clog the Internet,” Odlyzko wrote in an email late last week announcing the new data. “Growth rates, if anything, are tending down.”