IPUrbia

While I was doing some research for my last post, I ran across an interesting PDF summarizing growth and capacity of international underwater cables. Give it a read, it has some interesting numbers. A quick preview–trans-Atlantic traffic has grown as follows:
2003: 375 Gb/s
2004: 500 Gb/s
2005: 700 Gb/s

Another interesting statistic: Asia is enjoying the fastest growth in international Internet usage (75% growth in 2005, while Europe is last, lagging behind the North American 42% with 38%

It is especially interesting in light of recent discussion of a bandwidth crisis, albeit of limited application since it only deals with submarine International capacity. While “lit” capacity (ie fiber that is actively in use) is at 80-90% utilization, the unlit capacity goes up to an average of 10 Tb/s, depending on the links. Yes, that is 10 TERRA bits per second. In other words, as far as fiber goes, we are using around 5% of our current capacity using current technology. Given the idea that future technology growth is certain to bring exponential expansions in fiber capacity, it’s pretty safe to say that we are set for a long time to come.

All in all, this just further reinforces the idea that any bandwidth crunch is a monopolistically-imposed artifical market shortage.

(Note: all numbers are approximate, since I’m reading them from charts.)