Nielsen Report Says Internet Usage Flattening 105
Ant writes "This BetaNews story says an analysis of major Internet markets revealed that the time netizens spend online at home has come close to hitting a plateau in many major markets. Nielsen//NetRatings, a syndicated rating system for Internet audience measurement, measured markets in Brazil, Germany, Spain, Switzerland, Sweden, the United Kingdom and the United States and found them to be maturing. In contrast, Australia, France, Hong Kong, Italy and Japan experienced double-digit growth. According to Nielsen//NetRatings' press release (PDF) and current news story concluded that mature markets are in wait of "the next big thing" whereas emerging markets were rife with opportunity for companies online. Some of the growth engines cited in the report is the proliferation of broadband and societal changes in media consumption..."
Double-digit increase in Japan (Score:3, Informative)
I'd also say that most growth nowadays, in any market, is due to more widely available internet access. It seems that today, most businesses have broadband and have all of their computers online, which allows for employee surfing during slow time/breaks. Open, unsecured, and fee-based wireless access is available almost everywhere you go, and with more people having handheld and laptop devices, and all these portable gaming platforms with access, the numbers are only going to increase.
Even though usage seems to be leveling off in the US, I say in the next year, it's gonna spike again. Especially since there's so many regions where broadband isn't available and with cable modem/DSL trying to hit those markets.
Re:How? (Score:1, Informative)
They have this backwards. (Score:1, Informative)
If anything, this seems to suggest that countries with serious broadband horsepower are pulling away from the gawking pedestrians at an ever faster clip.
Well, it would except that both categories seem to include diverse collections of countries. Nonthless, the conlcusion they imply is hardly reflected in the numbers they gathered.
Re:Next big thing (Score:3, Informative)
Typically, streaming audio/video is done with UDP rather than TCP.
Also, Internet2 was specifically designed for large transfers like that.
Re:Does this mean we get to keep IPv4? (Score:1, Informative)
Re:Switch to IPv6? Not gonna happen (Score:3, Informative)
NAT allows me to not have to pay an extra $15/mo to my cable company to get 3 additional systems online, and it allows me to run servers for different things on different machines (for example, Apache and Samba run on the gentoo box, but VNC ports forward to my desktop machine and another set of ports forwards to each desktop computer for bittorrent use) while keeping one easy-to-remember hostname.
The truth is, my 4 systems don't all need their own IPs. I simply don't allow my windows machines to be exposed to wild traffic floating around on the internet
So I'd say NAT is a pretty good solution, and unlike IPv6, it's here now.