According to Arbor Networks, the report is believed to be the largest study of global Internet traffic since the start of the commercial Internet in the mid-1990s; offering an analysis of two years' worth of detailed traffic statistics from 110 large and geographically diverse cable operators, international transit backbones, regional networks and content providers. The study monitored more than 12 terabits-per-second and a total of more than 256 exabytes of Internet traffic.
"The data collected through this study and the trends that have been identified provide important insight for researchers and practitioners into the current direction and nature of Internet traffic and usage," University of Michigan Computer Science and Engineering Professor and Chair and Co-Founder of Arbor Networks, Farnam Jahanian, said. "This will be of great value in informing further research and development efforts into the nature of communications and security technologies that are integral to Internet evolution."
During the study, the Internet Observatory uncovered significant changes in Internet topology and commercial inter-relationships between providers; including changes in Internet protocols and applications. Unlike other Internet traffic trend reports, the Internet Observatory Report claims to provide a truly-global view into traffic trends, as a result of Arbor's "trusted partner" status amongst the Internet Service Provider (ISP) community. A main source of Internet traffic data analyzed for this report came from ATLAS data — an ongoing collaborative effort with 100+ ISPs, distributed globally across 17 countries, all who have agreed to share anonymous security, traffic and routing data on an hourly basis.
"The size and scale of the data behind The Internet Observatory report is what I find truly valuable. The report highlights some of the key trends that we have been following at Yankee Group for years and backs them up with quantitative data from real networks," Yankee Group Senior Analyst, Vince Vittore, offered. "Driven by a coalescing of content ownership and new disruptive distribution models, the business of the Internet is changing rapidly. As a result we think consumers and service providers must be prepared for a second phase of the commercial Internet."
Key Findings of the report include an analysis of the evolution of the Internet Core, revealing that over the past five years, Internet traffic has migrated away from the traditional 10 to 12 Tier-1 international transit providers. "Today, the majority of Internet traffic by volume flows directly between large content providers, datacenter / CDNs and consumer networks," the report states. "Consequently, most Tier-1 networks have evolved their business models away from IP wholesale transit to focus on broader cloud / enterprise services, content hosting and VPNs."
Also discussed is the rise of "Hyper Giants" such as Limelight, Facebook, Google, Microsoft and YouTube — 30 large companies which now generate and consume a disproportionate 30 percent of all Internet traffic.
"Five years ago, Internet traffic was proportionally distributed across tens of thousands of enterprise managed web sites and servers around the world," the report states. "Today, most content has increasingly migrated to a small number of very large hosting, cloud and content providers."
The increasing migration of applications to the web is also highlighted in the report, as is the drop in P2P traffic.
"Historically, Internet applications communicated across a panoply of application specific protocols and communication stacks," the report finds. "Today, the majority of Internet application traffic has migrated to an increasingly small number of web and video protocols, including video over web and Adobe Flash. Other mechanisms for video and application distribution, like P2P, have declined dramatically in the last two years."
The emergence of a new Internet ecosystem has become apparent as well, with the report finding that over the last five years, macroeconomic forces have radically transformed the global Internet.
"Economic changes, including the collapse of wholesale IP transit and the dramatic growth in advertisement-supported service, reversed decade-old business dynamics between transit providers, consumer networks and content providers," the report states. "A wave of innovation is ongoing, with service providers now offering everything from triple play services to managed security services, VPNs and increasingly, CDNs. This change in the Internet business ecosystem has significant ongoing implications for backbone engineering, design of Internet scale applications and research."
"The evolving network interconnection ecosystem has been loosely evident to network operators for awhile now; this research qualifies and quantifies those changes, and highlights many of the associated attributable effects with which network operators must consider," Nicolas Fischbach, director of network architecture at COLT, said. "For example, more densely interconnected edge networks enables more localized traffic exchange, however, it also means that traffic passed to traditional transit networks is quite likely to be destined for non-local destinations — often escalating costs for the transit network and negatively impacting operating margins."
"Saying the Internet has changed dramatically over the last five years is cliché — the Internet is always changing dramatically," Arbor Networks Chief Scientist, Craig Labovitz, said. "However, over the course of the last five years, we've witnessed the start of an equally dramatic shift in the fundamental business of the Internet. This research report, in collaboration with our partners at the University of Michigan and Merit Network, provides the in-depth visibility into what exactly has changed relative to the business side of the Internet in the past two years."
"The Internet Observatory uncovers some intriguing shifts in Internet usage patterns that the service provider community — many of whom are our customers — can leverage as they look for ways to improve service offerings balanced with improvements to their business, overall," Labovitz added.
"This report is just another example of Arbor's pioneering efforts to continually find collaboration points within the ISP community, facilitating cross-provider information sharing in order to solve critical issues such as network security and management, application visibility and capacity planning," an Arbor spokesperson stated. "The Internet Observatory was designed as a complement to Arbor's annual Worldwide Infrastructure Security Report which provides data [that is] useful to network operators so that they can make informed decisions about their use of network security technology to protect their mission-critical infrastructure."
