Internet

Internet Statistics

Internet World Stats estimates 1,407,724,920 people are using the Internet in March 2008.

That is 21.1 % of the world population.

Top 20 nations online in 2008.

Internet usage by regions in 2008.

How Fast did the Internet grow?

World wide growth

   December 1995    16 million online            .39% of world population        ( IDC).
   December 1997    70 million online          1.71% of the world population   (IDC).
   January 2000       248 million online          4.1% of the world population   ( Nua Ltd).
   December 2003   719 million online        11.1% of the world population   (IWS).
   June 2005           938 million online        14.6% of the world population    (IWS).

In 1981 there were 218 hosts. Over 1 million hosts existed in 1992. Below is a map of What countries were connected to the Internet in September 1991. Note that there were many countries in Africa and Asia that were not connected to the Internet. Some other countries in Eastern Europe, The Middle East and South America had no Internet access in 1991.

According to the Internet Systems Consortium (ISC), as of January 2007 there were 489 million IP hosts.

Some of the largest domain names categories (in Millions) in July 2007 are:

 net      180           Networks
 com       85    	Commercial
 jp        33  		Japan
 de        16 		Germany
 it        15 		Italy
 fr        14  		France
 cn        10           China
 edu       10  		Educational
 nl         9   	Netherlands
 au         9   	Australia
 br         8   	Brazil

Some countries like the  Somalia, and Zaire have no hosts.

The July Netcraft Web Domain Survey counted over 67 million Web servers. At the Netcraft page you can find information about the different servers a website might be using.

There are now 134,855 backbones in the US according to CIO magazine. A backbone are those very large networks or trunks on the Internet were Internet Exchange Point (IXP) occur. An example of an IXP is MAE-East that is on the east coast of the United States. It operates at speeds up to OC 48 or up to 2488.32 Million bit per second..

The image shows: "The colors represent who each router is registered to. Red is Verizon; blue AT&T; yellow Qwest; green is major backbone players like Level 3 and Sprint Nextel; black is the entire cable industry put together; and gray is everyone else, from small telecommunications companies to large international players who only have a small presence in the U.S. (CIO, 2006)."

Here is a visualization of the Internet in March and April 2005 by CAIDA

IP v 4 IP v 6

Traffic on the U.S. portion of the Internet's backbone surpassed 55 petabytes per month, more than double the 23 petabytes recorded in January 2001. (One petabyte equals 20 million four-drawer filing cabinets full of text.)

Is the Internet shrinking? Nonsense!, Carolyn Duffy Marsan
Network World, 01/28/02, http://www.nwfusion.com/news/2002/0128notshrinking.html

TeleGeography estimates that international Internet traffic will double approximately every two years. As of mid-2005, the combined average traffic on all cross-border backbone routes stood at just under 1 Terabit per second (Tbps). TeleGeography projects that average traffic will range from 2 to 3 Terabits per second by 2008.

a terabit is one trillion binary digits, or 1,000,000,000,000 (that is, 10¹²) bits.

IDC estimate of the amount of data on the Internet by 2007:

"According to IT analyst firm IDC, total traffic levels will increase from 180 petabits (Pb) per day in 2002 to 5,175Pb per day by the end of 2007.

To put its figures into perspective, the analyst pointed out that the entire printed collection of the US Library of Congress amounts to only 10 terabytes of information.

By 2007, IDC expects internet users will access, download, and share the information equivalent of the entire Library of Congress more than 64,000 times over, every day .http://www.vnunet.com/vnunet/news/2121654/broadband-doubles-internet-traffic.""

Internet Video -- Watch a Forbes video of Akamai & the Internet