The original Internet bubble buster, academic Andrew Odlyzko, is back with a new website that compiles actual recorded Internet traffic data to come up with a measure of bandwidth usage growth.

Among the key findings: Australia’s per capita data usage is less than 10% that of that in South Korea and Hong Kong, and that globally, usage growth is slowing, despite the recent emergence of multi-megabit access tails across many global markets.

The so-called Minnesota Internet Traffic Studies (MINTS) site, named after the University of Minnesota where Odlyzko heads the Digital Technology Centre, finds that as of mid-2007, bandwidth use both globally and in the US is growing at about 50%-60%, less than the 100% rates recorded during the last dotcom boom.

Odlyzko gained notoriety during the last boom when he used actual data to publicly challenge industry assertions that Internet traffic was doubling every 100 days.

Odlyzko says he is not surprised by the latest results. “We have been collecting the data for over 4 years, but it is only now that we have gone public, because we have enough data, and have overcome the technical hurdles of reverse engineering a decent fraction of the traffic graphs that are out there, and setting up a database for the information, which makes it easy to compute and display various statistics.  But I have been watching the graphs all along, and so had a general feeling for what was happening for quite a while.”

But he admits he is surprised by relatively low growth rates in markets such as Japan and South Korea which have brought high-speed broadband capacities to the mass market.

“I am very surprised at the slowdown in places like Hong Kong and Japan.  They have big pipes, so I would have expected them to increase their traffic quite a bit more.”

Also surprising are big differences in the total amount of monthly data consumed by users in various markets.

MINTS finds that while Hong Kong and South Korea consume 12 and 13.5 gigabits of data per month per capita, in Japan that falls to just 2 gigabytes—the same as the US where end user speeds are typically depicted as slower than developed Asia.

Usage per capita falls to 1.5 GB in western Europe and just 0.7 GB in Australia, finds the MINTS data.

The data is compiled from across 100 sites, mainly composed of national internet exchanges and university data networks. Regionally, these include sites as disparate as Internet exchanges in Taiwan and Bangladesh as well as university networks in Canberra and Chiang Mai, Thailand.

Odlyzko says that since he released the data, he has received feedback from commercial carriers seeking to become involved.

“There does seem to be some hope that more service providers will cooperate, which would improve the quality of the estimates tremendously,” he said, adding an appeal for CommsDay service provider readers who can contribute data to contact him directly at odlyzko@dtc.umn.edu.

“Several of the carriers that have been providing me data under NDAs will be holding conference calls with me in the near future, and, now that they see how I use what they gave me and in particular that I don't misuse it, appear to be willing to provide more details,” he said.

Odlyzko says it is important for the industry to have an empirically-based idea of where Internet traffic data usage is heading, lest it repeat the forecasting mistakes that created the last capacity bust in 2001.

By way of example, Odlyzko says “John Chambers, the CEO of Cisco, predicted both in 2005 and in a keynote at the NXTcomm conference in June 2007 that growth might accelerate towards 300 to 500% per year, and that the internal Cisco corporate network traffic load is currently growing at such rates.”

“On the other hand, in August 2007, Cisco released a pair of white papers which estimate that worldwide Internet traffic growth has been around 50% per year over the last few years, and project similar growth for the next few years. Thus even within a single company, and one that plays a central role in making the Internet function to boot, there are wide disparities in growth estimates, between 50 and 100% per year for current growth rates, and between 50 and 500% per year going forward.”

The website is available at http://www.dtc.umn.edu/mints