The Web as of Fall 1997

Contents:

• What Will the Internet Look Like in 50 Years?
• Demographics of the Web in 1996
• Other References

What Will the Internet Look Like in 50 Years?

• From Jan. 96 to July 1996, number Internet hosts grew from 9.26 million to 12.8 million. This is a slower rate of growth that last year. Slowdown could reflect softer economy in US, or declining rate of PC shipments in that period.
• Suppose we look at the number of telephones world-wide to predict the number of future Internet connections. There are 660 million telephones, used by 10% of the world's population (a surprising low percentage). Furthermore, only 50% of the people in the world have ever made a phone call (a surprisingly high percentage, given the 10% figure).
• In 50 years, the world population will grow to about 10 billion. Let's assume there are 100 devices on the Internet for each person. Why so many? This number assumes that Mark Weiser's notion of Ubiquitous [Scientific American, September 1991] computing will emerge in the future -- computers in everything, computers everywhere. Then there will be 500 billion Internet connections. (As a footnote, today's IP protocol version uses 32 bit IP addresses, allowing 4 billion hosts. The next version of IP, called IPv6, will allow 128 bit addresses, which will allow "more sites than there are electrons in the universe [http://www.interactivenews.com/excite/archive/1996/March/INN03.08.96_2.html]."
• What will those 100 devices per person be used for? All TVs and VCRs will be on the internet. Household appliances will be on the Internet. Sensors to detect where you are (like today's sensors that automatically turn out lights), where all your possessions are will be connected to the Internet. Even your clothing might have Internet connections for sensing or to signal you, prompting the terms softwear and hardwear. How about Internet lightbulbs? This will be possible when the cost of TCP/IP implementation plunges (i.e., when a TCP/IP implementation on chip is available), and "parasitic power" is used (i.e., body heat or solar heat).
• Will the existing fiber plant handle the Internet in 50 years?
• Currently 1% of MCI's fiber capacity is used to provide 622 Mbit/second Internet backbone links. (MCI is one of several backbone providers for the Internet.)
• Voice traffic is growing at 6-10% per year. Internet capacity demand is growing at 10-15% per month. If we assume that the number of Internet hosts doubles each year, we could assume the Internet capacity demand will grow by at least 300% per year.
• At the 300% growth rate, all MCI fiber capacity would be exhausted in the year 2000.
• However, improvements in methods to transmit data over fiber are producing steady bandwidth gains. Today, fiber can be used at a 2.4 gigabit/second rate. [I believe this is the rate in use today by MCI, but am not sure. -MA] It is reasonable to expect a growth to 10G/s soon, and a growth to 40G/s in the next century. So the fiber capacity should be adequate.
• Note that the real bottleneck in the Internet is whether routers can scale with the capacity demands.
• What the Internet of the future might look like:
• It is "information aware": computers and sensors catalog and answer queries. You could ask "where's the paper I scanned last week," because the scanner is on the Internet, and a log of your actions is searchable on the Internet.
• You could see what events are scheduled world-wide by the Internet (in contrast to the most popular use of the Web: document dissemination and archiving.)
• Web crawlers no longer hit all your Web site's pages to index them. Instead, each Web site publishes its own index information. Then the hit rate to Web servers goes down, and the Web site owner is able to control what pages are indexed.
• A service like video conferencing with a shared whiteboard would allow participation of people using devices with a great range of bandwidths. For example, a user with a monitor and high bandwidth connection sees everything, while a person with a phone and fax could get snapshots of pictures, which a telephone only user gets just voice.
• Manufacturers have standardized on one DC power level, and homes, offices, even planes are wired with DC as well as AC.
• The Internet and its hosts becomes an extended memory for you. You can ask "where did I put my novel last week" or "when did I think of this idea (in a patent case)."
• People will trade privacy and security for convenience. The privacy loss occurs because information about you and your actions is logged in the Internet of the future. The convenience comes in things like the extended memory function.

Demographics of the Web in Fall 1997

Why StudyDemographics?

• Learn how your site is being used
• Advertising
• Capacity planning
• Research (faster Internet, ...)

Hot toCollecting Demographics

• HTTP logging
• Four levels:  browser, proxy, server, network
• Caching presents special problems (aol.com is 1 big user)
• User surveys
• Cookies/user password authentication
• Identity problems
• Who is using your web browser -- your kids or you?
• Advertisers want to know more than your user name (income, spending problems)
• Privacy must be balanced

Web User Demographics

From the April 1997 GVU WWW Survey, Georgia Tech Research Corporation:

• 54% have college degree
• Average age:  35.2 years old
• Female users rising: 31.3% (possibly due to greater use by K-12 teachers)
• Users in education:  1/4; users in computer-related field: 30%
• 1/4 of users on Internet for < 1 year; of this 1/3 are > 50 years old
• Important issues to users:
• Censorship (1/3)
• Privacy (~1/4)
• Anonymity was valued first, followed by complete control over demographic information, followed by navigation (13%)
• 1/4 of users have provided false information!
• Location of access:
• 60% home, 30% work
• Connection speed: 1/3 28.8K, 1/5 33.6K, 11% 14.4K
• Payment for Internet access:  65% self, 1/3 work, 13% school, 5% parents
• Frequency of access:  85% once a day
• What do users do on Web?
• 44% use it 1-4 times a day
• 70% of users do browsing
• 46%: entertainment
• 47%: communication
• 52%: education
• 19%: shopping
• Web users are replacing TV viewing time
• Where respondents are located
• US: 80%
• Canada/Mexico: 7%
• Europe: 7%
• Not much difference in response by geographic region

Other References

• The Internet, by Gordon Bell, Internet World, 1995.
• Internet Demographics, from the "American Internet User Survey," published Jan. 1996.
• Fourth GVU WWW Survey, Georgia Tech Research Corporation, 1995.

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Last modified on 15 Jan 1998.

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