Hendrik Rood (Stratix) made an excellent observation recently.
He noticed that since a few months Ams-IX separates in their neutral peering point traffic statistics the data for the ISPs exchange from the GPRS Roaming Exchange Peering Amsterdam (GP-A) which is by far the largest neutral peering between the Tier-1 mobile data backbones (which are abbreviated as GRX).
Now according to Hendrik one has to be a bit cautious, as this is the international peering do not show the amount of the Dutch mobile operators peering (which is today between five networks run by 3 operators), but the growth pace and some features of the traffic pattern suggests several key points:
The Ams-IX annual report explained that YE2006 GP-A traffic was at the same level as ISP traffic was in september 1997, since then the GRX did not showed the more agressive growth path that Europe's ISP traffic followed. P-A traffic grows thus at a 10 year distance to fixed.
When during the summer months fixed internet traffic stabilises or slightly falls, mobile traffic soars. Roaming to the holiday locations is the explnantion.
This graph is something well worth to keep in mind whenever someone starts again with suggesting that mobile Internet will soon supplant fixed broadband.
( Thanks to Hendrik for allowing me to use the content of his mails)
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