An Exabyte is a lot of data. (An exabyte is 10¹⁸ bytes, or one billion gigabytes.) According to MINTS, five to eight exabytes flow through the internet each month. All this data has led to  predictions that the coming deluge of data from all the new video sites and other traffic congestion would flood the Internet.

TRU has seen its commodity internet transit traffic grow over the last few years. In aggregate with other BC Universities, this is an impressive and scary curve and would lead anyone to believe that the exaflood has arrived. Check out the blue line below.

But is the internet really growing?  In an Economist article, Andrew Odlyzko of the University of Minnesota talks about Internet traffic growth actually slowing, not increasing. This may be caused in part by the slowing of growth in peer-to-peer network traffic and the move to video web streaming sites like youtube or hulu.

This is now being confirmed by Canadian traffic patterns. CBC’s Search Engine PodCast #21 talks about the fact that Canadian ISP’s traffic growth is actually falling by 45%!

This all goes against the ISP’s issues with the Net Neutrality bill going before Canadian Parliament. They want to control traffic on the network so that their content offerings like TV and Movie downloads can compete with other services like Skype. In effect, they want a fast-lane and slow-lane on the superhighway.

But Network Expansionists fear not, these numbers are dealing with network growth not usage. There is still a requirement for developing new network technologies and installation of dark-fibre to ensure that traffic congestion is minimized and the exa-flood is averted.

Well not really. But the viewing of today’s wonderful, historic inauguration of President Obama put a major strain on the Internet, American cell phone networks and our firewall here at TRU. Here’s a snapshot of our firewall traffic during the speech. All the extra traffic on port 8247 was caused by staff watching the inauguration on CNN.

People noticed the network slowdown even though preparations for the increase in traffic were anticipated for the event. For example, CNN used the Octoshape plugin for the live stream to Flash players. This technology is Peer to Peer (P2P) which is an effective way of reducing traffic from CNN’s host servers. Even so, CNN reported having slow downs meeting the deluge.

Per Item 5 in my last post. That web visitor data from Alexa looked fishy. For a start, where was China? So I took a look at one year’s worth of log files in Google Analytics for www.tru.ca and got these countries ranked by visitor traffic:

1. Canada
2. United States
3. India
4. United Kingdom
5. China
6. Australia
7. Philippines
8. Germany
9. Japan
10. Saudi Arabia

Sorry for the grievious error. This cold is getting to me.

According to Alexa, the TRU website (www.tru.ca) is:

1. The  102,598 busiest website worldwide;
2. Is ranked 3,495 busiest website in Canada;
3. Is the 6th busiest university website in BC (see list below);
4. Is ranked 46th for all education websites in Canada (including sub-sites);
5. 57% of the website traffic comes from Canada but the top 10 countries for visitors in order are: Canada, India, USA, New Zealand, United Kingdom, Belgium, Philippines, Malaysia, Hong Kong and Singapore;
6. Traffic to tru.ca increased by 17% over the last three months;
7. the website is rated as fast, and;
8. 356 sites link to TRU.

Top 10 BC Higher Education Website Rankings – according to Alexa

1    University of BC
2    Simon Fraser University
3    University of Victoria
4    BC Insititute of Technology
5    Vancouver Island University
6    Thompson Rivers University
7    Langara College
8    Douglas College
9    Kwantlen Polytechnic
10  Okanagan College

Notes about Alexa: There is some controversy over the stats in the Alexa database as they are collected from users with the Alexa toolbar or other plugins installed which biases the rankings. Alexa is owned by Amazon.