The high tech bubble was inflated by myths of astronomical Internet traffic growth rates. Yet although these myths were false, Internet traffic was increasing very rapidly, close to doubling each year since 1997. Moreover, it continues growing close to this rate. This rapid growth reflects a poorly understood combination of many feedback loops operating on different time scales. Evidence about past and current growth rates and their sources is presented, together with speculations about the future. The expected rapid but not astronomical growth of Internet traffic is likely to have important implications for networking technologies that are deployed and for industry structure. Backbone transport is likely to remain a commodity and be provided as a single high quality service. It is probable that backbone revenues will stay low, as the complexity, cost, and revenue and profit opportunities continue to migrate towards the edges of the network.

With telecommunications in a slump, the search is on for ways to re-invigorate this key industry. The main problems are clearly economic much more than technological, and many of the proposed remedies would lead to new architectures for the Internet that would provide for greater control by carriers. They would drastically reduce...

While it is technically pleasing to believe that IP will dominate all forms of communication, our delight in its elegance is making us overlook its shortcomings. IP is an excellent means to exchange data, which explains its success. It remains ill-suited as a means to provide many other types of service; and is too crude to form the transport infrastructure in its own right. To allow the continued success of IP, we must be open-minded to it living alongside, and merging with, other techniques (such as circuit switching) and protocols that are optimized to different needs.

There is much dismay and even despair over the slow pace at which broadband is advancing in the United States. This slow pace is often claimed to be fatally retarding the recovery of the entire IT industry. As a result there are increasing calls for government action, through regulation or even through outright subsidies.

The migration of traditional TV to the Internet is likely to have little impact on the long distance network. The main reason is that consumers still take on the order of a decade to embrace new technologies (such as cell phones) or even improved variants of old media (as with CDs replacing vinyl records). Hence we should not expect traditional broadcast TV to change substantially or to migrate to new modes of distribution any time soon. Yet within much less than a decade, progress in photonics will produce an increase in the capacity of Internet backbones far beyond that required to carry all the broadcast TV signals. There will continue to be bottlenecks in the "last mile" that will limit the migration of TV to the Internet (and this will reinforce the natural inertia of the consumer market). However, the backbones are unlikely to be an impediment.

The collection of electronic data as evidence of crime is an important responsibility given to law enforcement. The technical constraints of this task are arguably far less significant than usability and economic ones, since police officers are non-specialists and police departments face significant budgetary limitations. In this position paper, we consider the economics of digital evidence recovery. We argue that the incentives of technology companies, law enforcement agencies and society do not always align, and furthermore that by studying these incentives in different applications we can better understand the efficiency and extent to which digital evidence is gathered. 1

Abstract This paper engages in a study of the conditions for convergence between information infrastructures. Inspired by the visions of convergence as one of the essential building blocks to achieve the goals of the Information Society and eEurope as well as the observation that no model has been proposed to address how and why convergence develops, we aim at providing a theoretical framework for studying such phenomena. To analyze the interrelatedness of the parallel evolution of information infrastructures, we introduce a concept of co-evolution and apply it to a study of the ongoing development of the two wireless communication platforms Universal Mobile Telephone System (UMTS) and Wireless Local Area Network (WLAN) in Norway. We emphasize the importance of an adequate understanding of the infrastructures involved, including the installed bases and their intra- and inter-linkages, to anticipate possible trajectories of co-evolution. Focusing on the network dimension of the communication platforms, we show how the various technologies, politics, interests and user preferences linked to the installed bases of each of the platforms may strongly influence the direction and speed of their co-evolution. Keywords Co-evolution, convergence, information infrastructure, installed base, UMTS, WLAN

Abstract. The measurement of the volume of information is fraught with difficulties. However, trends in availability and usage can be very revealing, as is shown by some examples. This paper argues that considerations of the volume of information should not be divorced from those of the value of information. In communications, informative comparisons appear to be possible by classifying technologies in just a few dimensions, associated with the features of cost, speed, availability, and usability. An argument is also made that as a rough approximation, the value of information in terms of its volume is best thought of on a logarithmic scale. This approach provides a rough quantitative guide to the diminishing marginal utility delivered by the rapid progress in computing, storage, and communication technologies. It offers a partial explanation for slow uptake of ultra-high speed broadband and related phenomena. This paper will appear in a special section of the International Journal of Communication: “How to measure how much information is out there? Methodological and statistical challenges for the social sciences.”

In today’s world, e-mail has become one of the most important means of communication in business and private lives due to its efficiency. However, the problems start as soon as mail volumes go beyond the scope of human information processing capabilities. Firstly, time does not allow for leaving certain messages unanswered for a long time, and in certain cases, for reading all messages. Secondly, the dilemma of electronic filters leaves a choice of too many junk mails getting through versus a risk of solicited mails being dumped. In this paper we present a new interactive visual data mining approach for analyzing individual e-mail communication. It combines classical visual analytics (help to identify pattern such as peaks and trends over time) with geo-spatial map distortions (help to understand the routes of e-mails). Experiments show that our visual e-mail explorer produces useful and interesting visualizations of large collections of e-mail and is practical for exploring temporal and geo-spatial patterns hidden in the e-mail data.

To contribute to understanding of information economies of daily life, this paper explores over the past millennium given names of a large number of persons. Analysts have long both condemned and praised mass media as a source of common culture, national unity, or shared symbolic experiences. Names, however, indicate a large decline in shared symbolic experience over the past two centuries, a decline that the growth of mass media does not appear to have affected significantly. Study of names also shows that action and personal relationships, along with time horizon, are central aspects of effective communication across a large population. The observed preference for personalization over the past two centuries and the importance of action and personal relationships to effective communication are aspects of information economies that are likely to have continuing significance for industry developments, economic statistics, and public policy. 1 The most current version is available from ...