Given recent media coverage, it's easy to believe that P2P and streaming video traffic is a rising hurricane battering upon ISP levees, that ISPs are frantically sandbagging their systems against disaster, that throttling, bandwidth caps, and traffic management are urgent and absolute necessities to keep the storm surge at bay. But new research from Telegeography only confirms what we've been saying for some time: the Internet backbone isn't drowning beneath any kind of exaflood. In fact, backbone capacity has grown faster than Internet traffic in the last year—for the second year in a row.

Telegeography monitors utilization levels on major backbone lines, not on last-mile connections, and it does so around the world. While some major links are seeing traffic increase faster than capacity (the US/Latin American links are the prime suspects), most links actually saw decreasing utilization this last year.

Even as international Internet traffic surged by just over 50 percent from mid-2007 to mid-2008, worldwide backbone capacity grew even faster. Despite the bandwidth horror stories, average link utilization on major backbone lines fell from 31 percent to 29 percent. Even peak utilization, often trotted out as a key reason for doing traffic management, fell from 44 percent to 43 percent.



Data source: Telegeography

So why all the talk of a bandwidth crisis? With backbone capacity outstripping capacity, it's clear that router technology isn't in any immediate danger of being overwhelmed by traffic. The problem isn't technical, it's an investment/profitability issue, especially in the last mile. ISPs often complain that they can't simply build out capacity to solve congestion problems, in part because protocols like BitTorrent consume every bit of bandwidth that's available (an odd argument, if you think about it, because a protocol can only consume the maximum bandwidth purchased by the customer, it can't magically expand to absorb all space on a network).

Arguments then usually devolve into consumer accusations of "overselling" and eye-rolling from ISPs, who explain "statistical multiplexing" and trot out the dreaded road analogies.

But one point is clear: Tier 1 backbone operators, which handle the largest traffic flows in the world, have no trouble with capacity even when peak utilization is taken into account. The backbone business tends to be cyclical, due to the cost of major network upgrades; while for some years traffic had growing faster than capacity, backbone providers have now responded with significant capacity increases for two years in a row.

That's good news for the ISPs who use peering and transit arrangements to send their traffic around the world, since wide-open pipes from multiple providers mean lower transit prices. It's also good news for Internet users, who don't (yet, at least) need to worry about some coming age of bandwidth scarcity that will stop the shift toward web video.