Lawrence G. Roberts

One of the leading founders of the basic technical basement of Internet - packet network: "... was responsible for the design, initiation, planning and development of ARPANET, the world’s first major packet network, the predecessor to Internet, while the Director of Information Processing Techniques for DARPA. After ARPA, ... founded the world’s first packet data comm carrier, Telenet, and was the CEO from 1973 to 1980. Telenet was sold to GTE in 1979 and subsequently became the data division of Sprint..."

Anthony M. Rutkowski

... global enterprise strategist, public official, organization leader, consultant, lecturer, and author in both the Internet and telecom worlds ...

Growth of the Internet: Statistics

The basic question: How many people are online worldwide as of August 2001... And the number is 513.41 million.

DATE NUMBER % POP SOURCE August 2001 513.41 million 8.46 Nua Ltd August 2000 368.54 million 6.07 Nua Ltd August 1999 195.19 million 4.64 Nua Ltd Sept 1998 147 million 3.6 Nua Ltd November 1997 76 million 1.81 Reuters December 1996 36 million .88 IDC December 1995 16 million .39 IDC

World Total 513.41 million Africa 4.15 million Asia/Pacific 143.99 million Europe 154.63 million Middle East 4.65million Canada & USA 180.68 million Latin America 25.33 million

Compiled from: Nua Internet Surveys

• 

  Source: Global Internet Statistics (by Language)

ISP Sources of Revenue: early beginning ...

	1996	1997	1998
Internet Access	1.21	1.21	5.53
Web Hosting & Security	0.17	0.17	0.99
Electronic Commerce	0.01	0.01	0.24

        Revenue above:   In billions of dollars.    Source: Forrester Research,    Riggs, B (April 28, 1997) Hard Times for the Small ISP, LanTimes. 55-58 Online quote: The Internet: from Backbone to End-Use

 

Great AmeriNet Dream ... as it was just a couple of years ago:

... e-commerce sales could balloon to $37.5 billion this (1998 - ed.) year, according to market researcher Jupiter Communications in New York.
by   Jon Swartz, Jamie Beckett,  SF Chronicle, November 25, 1998

Projections for the year 2002 from Forrester and Jupiter currently range between USD200 to USD300 billion . CEO of Cisco Systems, John Chambers   reckons that figure will be closer to 1 trillion . At Networld 98, industry analyst Nicholas Lippis announced that online commerce would generate USD1.5 trillion of US GDP by 2002. Paradigm Shifts, Nua Internet Surveys,November 2nd 1998

 

and what happened in real life:

E-Commerce Growth Rates and 2001 Monthly Spending (U.S.) Month Yearly Growth (2000-2001) 2001 Monthly Spending (billions) April 73.1% $4.5 May 103.5% $5.4 June 71.2% $5.3 July 39.0% $4.9 August 57.2% $5.6 September 53.7% $4.7 October 25.0% $4.6 November 10.1% $5.3 Source: Nielsen//NetRatings and Harris Interactive

$13.8 billion spent online during the 2001 holiday season

New York and Rochester, NY, January 7, 2002—Over the eight weeks of November and December, Americans spent $13.8 billion online. A Goldman Sachs, Harris Interactive SM, and Nielsen//NetRatings (www.nielsen-netratings.com) eSpending report revealed this latest economic information. In comparison, $12 billion was spent during the 2000 holiday season

“Online holiday spending continued its growth, despite pressures from the slowing U.S. economy.

Source: Business Channels

 

Number of the Web pages in July 1998:   300 millions,
1.5 Million Web Pages Born Daily,
50% of all traffic goes to the top 900 Web sites currently available.
     by Alexa Internet, InternetWorld online, 31-Aug-1998 10:08:46 EDT, 

Percentage increase in Internet traffic, per month: 30

- Number of security incidents reported to the Computer Emergency Response Team Coordination Center in 1995:   2412
- Number reported in 1988:   6

Number of Internet Service Providers (ISPs) in the U.S. and Canada, in August, 1997: 4,133

Number of ISP, worldwide in July, 1996: 3,054

Average number of customers at an ISP: 1,850
          Data source: Win Trees

 

The Stats Map of Net History

30 Years of theNet History in Brief Stats Story

Date	Hosts	Domains*	WebSites	WHR(%)***
Jul 98	36,739,000	4,300,000**	4,270,000**	12
Jan 98	29,670,000	2,500,000**	2,450.000**	8.3
Jul 97	19,540,000	1,301,000	1,200,000	6.2
Jul 96	12,881,000	488,000	300,000	2.3
Jul 95	6,642,000	120,000	25,000	0.4
Jul 94	3,212,000	46,000	3,000	0.1
Jul 93	1,776,000	26,000	150	0.01
Jul 92	992,000	16,300	50	0.005
Jul 89	130,000	3,900	-
Jul 81	210
1969	4

© Gregory Gromov 1996-2002

Data sources: Network Wizards (US), Dr A D Marshall (UK)

*/ The total number of the all types of Domains (commercial -- com.; non-profit organizations -- org.; educational ... --- edu.; ... etc.)
**/The IVI    estimations

***/The WebSites to Hosts Ratio (WHR):

WHR estimates the percent  of content active  part of Net community.  By other words, WHR reflects what is the percent of Web surfing people that are trying to  become the  Web authors by creating their own Web sites. So we ( - G.R.G) consider the WHR as acreative temperature of  Web

 

... traffic over the Internet   doubling every 100 days By Frances Hong, Internet Capacity Major Theme For 1999 - Study, NEW YORK (Reuters), December 6, 1998 Net traffic will quadruple in   2001  Larry Roberts, Forbes, December 10, 2001

Internet Traffic Growth by Larry Roberts 

-Traffic is for US backbone network, not including local calls, for both Internet and PSTN;
-Traffic growth is higher than host growth because the traffic/host ratio growth at 14 percentage per year

 

	... more data than voice conversations now take place daily on British Telecommunications Plc's domestic network ...   traditional telephone calls were being replaced by electronic mail (e-mail) ... ... increased use of e-mail, electronic commerce (e-commerce) and multimedia services in addition to conventional and mobile telephony would double the size of the British communications market from its current $49.62 billion within five years ...
	Yahoo! News: Technology Headlines, November 5, 1998

 

Internet Hosts by Tony Rutkowski
The Host means iniquely reachable Internet connected computer

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The picture above  is  the slide of the Internet Trends' collection --
one of the most impressive of Internet stats related slide collections I've ever seen.
Check it out!

 

Why Hosts?

Because there is not any other ways to count the Internet populations at all: "No one has any clue how many users there are, but most people would agree that there is at least one user per host."

Internet Domain Survey. The Nua Ltd. and others's quote.

 

You might want to take a look on some  of the illustrations of the above suggestion:

Estimated number of web users in the U.S.: 57,037,000  by  Win Treese , May 1998

...the active number of Internet users in the United States is only 37 million, well below the widely reported range of 50 million to 70 million seen in most published reports.
Bits & Bytes, by Michael Bush , July, 1998. 

... about 15 million of the total 23 million U.S. households on the Internet receive their online service through AOL.
AOL Eyes Half Of All New Online Users, September, 1998

So, according to " Irresponsible Internet Statistics...",
... there is no absolute way to measure any statistic regarding the growth of the Internet. As John Quarterman of MIDS says:

The Internet is distributed by nature. This is its strongest feature, since no single entity is in control, and its pieces run themselves, cooperating to form the network of networks that is the Internet. However, because no single entity is control, nobody knows everything about the Internet. Measuring it is especially hard because some parts choose to limit access to themselves to various degrees. So, instead of measurement, we have various forms of surveying and estimation.


So all the statistics presented here are based on estimates and conjecture. And even if they were absolutely true, growth rates change. I (Robert Orenstein) read somewhere (if you know where I saw this, please tell me) that there is only one conclusion that can possibly be drawn from such vague data:

	The Internet is getting big, and it's happening fast.

"The Internet is getting big, ...".   
Do we still believe that the bigger is   better?

	Percentage of U.S. public schools connected to the Internet
1994	35
1996	65

Data source: Win Trees

"In a poll taken early last year (1996 -ed.) U.S. teachers ranked computer skills and media technology as more "essential" than the study of European history, biology, chemistry, and physics; than dealing with social problems such as drugs and family breakdown; than learning practical job skills; and than reading modern American writers such as Steinbeck and Hemingway or classic ones such as Plato and Shakespeare.

... The Kittridge Street Elementary School, in Los Angeles, killed its music program last year to hire a technology coordinator; ... Mansfield, Massachusetts, administrators dropped proposed teaching positions in art, music, and physical education, and then spent $333,000 on computers;  in one Virginia school the art room was turned into a computer laboratory. (Ironically, a half dozen preliminary studies recently suggested that music and art classes may build the physical size of a child's brain, and its powers for subjects such as language, math, science, and engineering -- in one case far more than computer work did.) ...

The Computer Delusion ,  by Todd Oppenheimer,
The Atlantic Monthly; July 1997

 

Check your knowledge!

Warning! This is a special kind of test for the very small group of Web surfing people. The members of this group should be able to provide us with local ISP's offically proven certificates concerning  their top IQ level. We also accept Visa, MasterCard, American Express, MS InterDev and some of the Novell, Sun, IBM and Oracle, (we are constantly expanding the List) basic products certificates of Net proficiency.

Who coined the  phrases:	Web might be better than sex	information superhighway	WorldWideWeb	Hypertext
Sylvester Stallone
Bob Metcalfe
Al Gore
Ted Nelson
Tim Berners-Lee
Mark Andressen

Copyright  2002 © G. Gromov 

First of all you might want to check the boxes in some of the table's cells according to your personal feelings or Net History knowledge based choices. After the most hard working "check-box" step of this test will be successfully completed, you would be able ... relax for a couple of minutes and than... take a look on the   real version   of above mentioned table to compare the real Net History facts with your recent feelings and choices.