I just came across this CNN story from January, but I don’t think it’s gotten the play that it merits.
You probably know that the Internet has its roots in the Defense Department’s old Advanced Research Projects Agency, known as ARPA. The guy in charge of information processing for ARPA — what became known as ARPANet — was Lawrence Roberts. Roberts said some interesting things in January. Among them:
- Tech slowdown or no tech slowdown, Net traffic has consistently been doubling every year.
- In January, the Net handled 55 petabytes of data. For you English system mavens, that’s 55 quadrillion, or 55,000,000,000,000,000 bytes. In one month.
- The pace will continue to grow for another 10 years, at which point growth will slow. But doubling traffic every year for 10 years means that there will be three more zeros at the end of that already very long number above.
My question: will that kind of traffic allow all the dark fiber that was installed in the 1990s to be turned on?
