A few weeks ago, Dave Rusin over at Telecom Straight Shooter posted this article previewing some nice new work by Andrew Odlyzko from up at the University of Minnesota. Dr. Odlyzko is of course very well known in the bandwidth world for his independent research on traffic growth rates amongst other things. Dave included a letter from him seeking data from the movers and shakers in the industry, focusing on the telecom bubble of a decade ago. To quote Dr. Odlyzko’s email:
To get a better understanding of the dynamics of that bubble, to assist in the preparation of a book about that incident, I am soliciting information from anyone who was active in telecom during that period.
I would particularly like to know what you and your colleagues estimated Internet traffic growth to be, and what your reaction was to the O’Dell/Sidgmore/WorldCom/UUNet myth. If you were involved in the industry, and never heard of it, that would be extremely useful to know, too.
Ideally, I would like concrete information, backed up by dates, and possibly even e-mails, and a permission to quote this information. However, I will settle for more informal comments, and promise confidentiality to anyone who requests it.
Now, I know for a fact that Telecom Ramblings has quite a few readers who were intimately involved in such things back then! If you’re willing to help document history from the inside rather than let the media and financial communities get all the words in, perhaps it’s time to speak up.
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Andrew’s later summarization of his findings related to that same letter, from one large forum, at least – NANOG – appears here:
http://siliconinvestor.advfn.com/readmsg.aspx?msgid=26747365
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In looking for historical data, I would offer up data collected by Technology Futures out of Austin. Dr. Vanston and his group have been tracking this data and forecasting the future growth for a number of years with pretty accurate results. Majority of his data come from the large telcos.
http://www.tfi.com/about/trackrecord.pdf