Domain survey and a few other statistics
From: Tony Rutkowski
Subject: Strategic Note - Latest Internet Statistics
======================================================================
Strategic Note 20 Feb 1996
INTERNET SURVEY REACHES NEARLY 10 MILLION INTERNET HOST LEVEL
EXPONENTIAL GROWTH RECORD CONTINUES
--Sunnyvale CA, USA. The latest results from the Internet's most
basic and longest continuing measurement of it's size were just
released by Mark Lottor of Network Wizards at Menlo Park CA USA.
The Domain Survey attempts to discover every host on the Internet
by doing a complete search of the Domain Name System. The results
were gathered during January 1996. The raw data plus some
Network Wizard chart are available at ftp://ftp.nw.com/zone or
http://www.nw.com/.
Lottor's measurements show that the Internet currently consists
of countless autonomous networks, representing 240,000 domains,
with 9,472,000 "advertised" connected computers. Because of the
unknown and potentially unlimited numbers of multiuser computers
and network or application gateways, it is not possible to
correlate this any of this information with the number of end
users.
Further processing and analyzing Lottor's data over the past
several years reveals the following newsworthy and strategic
highlights:
o The figure of 9.4 million hosts represents a current annual
host growth rate of 85 percent, and was precisely the
predicted number based on the average growth rate over
the past four years. In other words, the Internet's
exponential growth rate continues unabated.
o Considering the increasing tendency of hiding large numbers
of hosts behind firewalls, the actual number of connected
hosts is likely far higher.
o Hosts named "WWW" constitute by far the largest and fastest
number of hosts - 76 thousand computers and increasing at
the annual rate of 2,400 percent.
o The largest single domain is .com with 2.4 million hosts,
and now constitutes 26 percent of all hosts.
o Fifty-one country and global top level domains are experiencing
annual growth rates in excess of 100 percent.
o Among country and global top level domains above the 10,000
mark, the most rapidly growing included: Singapore, .net,
Russian Federation, the US domain, Brazil, Finland, Japan,
Israel, Italy, Poland, Taiwan, the UK, and Ireland. (See
below.)
o In absolute numbers, the most rapidly growing domains were
.com, .net, .edu, UK, US, Canada, Japan, Germany, and
Australia - all with six month increases in excess of
100,000 hosts. (See below.)
o The increases in the US domain are substantially from primary
and secondary schools.
o Without subsequent processing to attribute the three
letter global domains to a country previously done by
John Quarterman of MIDS , it's
not possible to determine final country figures. However,
it appears approximately that the same 60% - 40% balance
between USA versus non-USA, proportions remain. A
subsequent strategic note will be prepared if Quarterman
derives and makes available this information.
o The domains of 30 countries or territories appeared on the
host count for the first time - apparently connecting since
July 95. (See below) However, these host may not
necessarily be actually in the country.
Very attractive new graphic presentations of all these values
and trends can be found at
http://www.genmagic.com/internet/
ftp://ftp.genmagic.com/pub/internet/trends-v7.ppt PowerPoint v7.0
ftp://ftp.genmagic.com/pub/internet/trends-v4.ppt PowerPoint v4.0
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