THE CHANGING GLOBAL INTERNET SERVICE INFRASTRUCTURE

The Internet interconnects over 12,000 networks worldwide and is growing at an exponential rate, as measured by domain registrations and packet counts. Increasingly often, people want to know how fast a particular part of the Internet is growing in order to do capacity planning, gauge commercial promise, or simply to understand this important change in our society. Yet, looking only at registrations and packet counts does not uncover the full complexity of the situation. There are a variety of ways that sites can connect to the Internet, each offering different capabilities, costs, technical problems, and security considerations. In this paper we analyze Internet growth based on measurements of which of a dozen common TCP services could be reached at each of over 13,000 sites worldwide, tested four times over the course of 1992. We analyze these data as a function of country, type of institution, and type of service. We also derive mathematical models that can be used to project growth rates for individual countries and the global Internet.