Comment 305

By adrian (registered) | Posted March 20, 2006 at 10:25:46

Peter - yes, the page is somewhat old, and I accept that criticism. I linked to it because I found it difficult to find the precise information I was looking for, and so I was forced to be vague and say "Much, if not most". However, what's at issue here is infrastructure, which does not change nearly as quickly as, say, software. So the fact the page is seven years old does not contradict my point. I would be happy to take a look at any evidence you have that supports your assertion that "most countries have their own complete internet infrastructure and don't route their traffic trough the USA", but until I see it, I think my point stands. This article (PDF): http://www.mohr.de/jrnl/jite/pdf/jite161... Has some interesting stats and is much more up-to-date. Although I don't understand significant portions of it (it's highly mathematical), it does show that North American data traffic still exceeds the closest competitor, Europe, by about 110 petabytes per year, or about 22%. This alone does not illustrate my point, except to demonstrate US data traffic clout, but in the Appendix, there is a brief look at Korean Telecom (KT). It says: "In the year 2003, KT (formerly Korea Telecom) had secured traffic capacity of 6 Gbit/s through transit contract with Tier-1 U.S. backbone providers, 2.6 Gbit/s through peering contract with Tier-2 U.S. providers, and 3.4 Gbps through peering with Asian providers. KT has also taken advantage of the multihoming strategy adopted by the popular U.S. content providers and established direct connectivity to portal sites such as Yahoo. Despite improvement in its net traffic balance, Korea Telecom pays substantial fees to the switching hubs in the U.S."

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