Voice traffic vs Internet

Stewart Fist (fist@zip.com.au)
Tue, 05 May 1998 09:49:06 +1000

Max Walsh begins his column in the SMH today with the line:
"Internet traffic across the Pacific to the United States now exceeds voice
traffic. If you are not impressed by that, let me tell you that people at
Telstra are"

This is obviously another feed of information from Telstra's corporate PR.
Currently they are trying to convince the Senate Inquiry that their call
monopoly is threatened by Voice over IP, and therefore that the industry is
already competitive.

How many linkers think that Internet traffic exceeds voice traffic across the Pacific?

And what measurement do you use?

Bits per second, connection time, data volume, calls (is a page-hit counted as
a 'call').

My estimation, given that both PacRimEast and West run two pairs of fibres at
560Mb/s, is that the total Pacific fibre capacity available (discounting all
the satellite stuff) is 2.4Gb/s, of which they keep half in reserve (actually,
I've since been told that a lot of this is used by the US Department of
Defence). Even so, half this total is 1200Mb/s.

What do we use over Pacific fibre for the Internet? The last time I looked
the estimates were about 120Mb/s. Is this still valid (Ramin?)?

So what eats up the other 1000Mb/s (with probably as much again on satellites
- not TV).

I wonder also if Telstra only count their own voice traffic, and disregard all
that private line stuff, and also the voice capacity leased to other carriers
like C&W, WorldCom, etc.

Has anyone ever seen any figures on this — or on whether they are using ADPCM
or other voice compression systems.

-- 
Stewart Fist - writer and columnist
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