Internet growth stats

From John C Dvorak. Amazing!

"It's actually the astonishing overall growth of the Internet that is amazing. In 1990, the total U.S. backbone throughput of the Internet was 1 terabyte, and in 1991 it doubled to 2TB. Throughput continued to double until 1996, when it jumped to 1,500TB. After that huge jump, it returned to doubling, reaching 80,000 to 140,000TB in 2002.

"This ridiculous growth rate has continued as more and more services are added to the burden. The jump in 1996 is attributable to the one-two punch of the universal popularization of the Web and the introduction of the MP3 standard and subsequent music file sharing.

"More recently, the emergence of inane video clips (YouTube and the rest) as universal entertainment has continued to slam the Net with overhead, as has large video file sharing via BitTorrent and other systems.

"Then VoIP came along, and IPTV is next. All the while, e-mail numbers are in the trillions of messages, and spam has never been more plentiful and bloated. Add blogging, vlogging, and twittering and it just gets worse.

"According to some expensive studies, the growth rate has begun to slow down to something like 50 percent per year. But that's growth on top of huge numbers. Petabytes."