By Nick Patience
While some surveys and polls indicate that the first significant brakes are being applied to the internet’s growth in the form of page views, transactions with online brokers and the like, which are probably due to simple competition, the longest-running and arguably most widely-respected survey of the physical size of the internet sees the pace of growth picking up once again.
The latest report from Network Wizard’s internet domain survey places the number of hosts at 56.2 million, up 30% from the last survey six months earlier and has pushed the annual growth rate to 53% from 46% indicated by the last survey. By ‘hosts’ the consultancy means machines with an IP address allocated to them and that are connected to the internet.
It should be noted that Network Wizards readily admits that when it publishes its survey each February and August, the the number of connected hosts could be a fair way off the actual number of machines connected to the net because single machines can have multiple IP addresses. However, it does provide a good indication of the overall pace of growth.
According to research performed on the data by internet consultant Tony Rutkowski of NGI Associates, the net should reach 100 million hosts by the first quarter of 2001; one quarter earlier than was expected six months ago. Rutkowski also points out that the internet is currently expanding at the rate of 50 new hosts and 10 new domains each minute.
The most popular domain is, of course .com, with some 18.7 million hosts, which is 33% of the total and represents a 55% increase from the previous survey. Hosts with .net extensions increased by 40% and of the larger country-code domains, Japan, France and Brazil all posted strong growth figures. The much- maligned .us country domain posted flat growth from six months ago, according to Rutkowski’s analysis.
One odd finding of the survey is the sudden appearance of lucent.com at the top of the pile of the top 100 second-level domains when it wasn’t even on the list six months previously. The survey found some 4.7 million machines hanging off the lucent.com zone, with aol.com, the next most popular second-level domain having just 1.7 million, but having grown in proportion from the previous survey.
Lucent Technologies Inc was unaware of the survey when we pointed this out, but said it would look into it. It did say, however, that it has a maximum of 135,000 machines running off any of its domains. It points out that it’s a hardware and software company, not a service provider, which tend to have the most IP addresses. The Internet Software Consortium (ISC), which sponsors the survey did not want to try and explain this, saying it was up to others to analyze the data.
The findings of the survey, which Menlo Park, California-based Network Wizard’s Mark Lottor has conducted biannually since 1987 are now owned by Austin, Texas-based based Matrix Information and Directory Services (MIDS), which has assisted Lottor since 1993. http://www.nw.com
