Introduction to the Internet - Gloria Boone

Internet 2009

The Internet Turned 40 years old on September 2, 2009

video Internet history

US Internet Users

In a national survey between November 30 and December 27, 2009, PEW Internet and American Life found: "74% of American adults (ages 18 and older) use the internet -- a slight drop from our survey in April 2009, which did not include Spanish interviews. At that time we found that 79% of English-speaking adults use the internet. 60% of American adults use broadband connections at home – a drop that is within the margin of error from 63% in April 2009. 55% of American adults connect to the internet wirelessly, either through a WiFi or WiMax connection via their laptops or through their handheld device like a smart phone. This figure did not change in a statistically significant way during 2009."

eMarkerter in 2009 estimated that there are about 200 million users, or 65% of the total population. By 2013, 221 million people will be online, nearly 70% of the population (Phillips, L., 2009)

Daily Internet usage among nearly all demographic groups is climbing. Average time spent online by US adults shot up to 14 hours per week in 2008, compared with 11 hours in 2007. Nearly two-thirds of adults claim they go online every day, the majority for more than one hour (Phillips, L., 2009).

Internet Statistics

Internet World Stats estimates 1,733,993,741 people are using the Internet by the end of June 2009.

That is 25.6% of the world population.

Top 20 nations online. in 2009. China now has more Internet users than the U.S.A.

Internet usage by regions in 2009.

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 July 2009 there were 681 million IP hosts.

Some of the largest domain names categories (in Millions ) in July 20 09 are:

Some countries have few internet providers like Somalia with 0 host,and North Korea with 3 hosts. http://ftp.isc.org/www/survey/reports/current/report.bynum

The April 2009 Netcraft Web Domain Survey counted over 231 million Web servers. At the Netcraft page you can find information about the different servers a website might be using. As Netcraft noted:"Apache remains in the lead, as it has since 1996, with a total of over 106 million sites, followed by Microsoft-IIS with over 67 million and QQ with almost 29 million."

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