A Measurement Study of Changes in Service-Level Reachability in the Global Internet

The Internet is currently in a period of exponential growth, as measured by domain registrations and packet counts. Increasingly often, people want to know how fast a particular part of the Internet is growing - to do capacity planning, gauge commercial promise, or simply to understand this important change in our society. Yet, looking only at registrations and packet counts does not uncover the full complexity of the situation. There are a variety of ways that sites can connect to the Internet, each offering different capabilities, costs, and technical problems. Moreover, growing awareness of network security problems is changing the way people think about connecting to the Internet, based on mechanisms such as firewall gateways. In this paper we analyze Internet growth based on measurements of which of a dozen common TCP services could be reached at each of over 13,000 domains worldwide, tested four times over the course of 1992. We analyze this data as a function of country, type of..