Government Statistics

Governments generally took a hands-off attitude to the Internet, especially in earlier days. While this provided much flexibility and likely speeded up development of this new infrastructure, it also helped inflate the telecom bubble. It is almost certain that a simple reporting requirement as to the volume of Internet traffic (similar to what has traditionally been required for voice traffic) would have punctured the myth of "Internet traffic doubling every 100 days) and prevented the waste of over $100 billion in the United States alone on redundant long haul fiber networks.

Over the last few years, two governments have been collecting and disseminating information about Internet traffic in their countries:

• Australia

The Australian Bureau of Statistics periodically publishes the report "8153.0 - Internet Activity." The report for the quarter ending June 2008 was released on September 22, 2008, and is available here.

Earlier reports (going back to the quarter ending Sept. 2000) are available here, and presumably future releases will be as well.

The Australian reports show monthly Internet traffic (defined here as downloads by business and residential customers) as follows:

Australian Internet traffic
Date	PB/month
Mar 2001	0.3
Mar 2002	0.6
Mar 2003	1.0
Mar 2004	1.9
Mar 2005	4
Jun 2006	12
Mar 2007	14
Dec 2007	20
Jun 2008	20

The entry for June 2008 in the table above was obtained by scaling the numbers in the official report to compensate for the exclusion of small ISPs from the survey. See the explanatory notes to the report about the change in survey methodology that produced the report.

For some speculations about the reasons for the sudden deceleration in growth rates, see the iTWire news story.

• Hong Kong

The Office of the Telecommunications Authority of the Government of Hong Kong compiles extensive statistics on Internet usage. The English-language entry to the general collection of data is here and the specific statistics on customer broadband traffic downloads is available here. The following table is derived from that page.

Hong Kong Internet traffic
Date	PB/month
Jun 2001	0.8
Jun 2002	2
Jun 2003	9
Jun 2004	29
Jun 2005	55
Jun 2006	82
Jun 2007	103
Jun 2008	109

Note: For conversion purposes, it is worth mentioning that Australian data as presented in the ABS reports is in bytes, but for entire quarters. Hong Kong's OFTA data is for months, but in terms of bits, not bytes. The populations of Australia and Hong Kong are about 20 and 7 million, respectively (vs. 300 million for U.S., 130 for Japan, and 500 million for the European Union, to use round numbers).