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Re: Google wants to be your Internet

  • From: Marshall Eubanks
  • Date: Sat Jan 20 16:10:41 2007

Hello;

On Jan 20, 2007, at 1:37 PM, Rodrick Brown wrote:


On 1/20/07, Mark Boolootian <[email protected]> wrote:


Cringley has a theory and it involves Google, video, and oversubscribed
backbones:

http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/2007/pulpit_20070119_001510.html


The following comment has to be one of the most important comments in
the entire article and its a bit disturbing.

"Right now somewhat more than half of all Internet bandwidth is being
used for BitTorrent traffic, which is mainly video. Yet if you
surveyed your neighbors you'd find that few of them are BitTorrent
users. Less than 5 percent of all Internet users are presently
consuming more than 50 percent of all bandwidth."

Those sorts of percentages are common in Pareto distributions (AKA Zipf's law AKA "the 80-20 rule").
With the Zipf's exponent typical of web usage and video watching, I would predict something closer to
10% of the users consuming 50% of the usage, but this estimate is not that unrealistic.

I would predict that these sorts of distributions will continue as long as humans are the primary consumers of
bandwidth.

Regards
Marshall


--
Rodrick R. Brown