Google Sets New Internet Traffic Record
by Craig LabovitzIn their earnings call last week, Google announced a record 2010 third-quarter revenue of $7.29 billion (up 23% from last year). The market rejoiced and Google shares shot past $615 giving the company a market cap of more than $195 billion.
This month, Google broke an equally impressive Internet traffic record — gaining more than 1% of all Internet traffic share since January. If Google were an ISP, as of this month it would rank as the second largest carrier on the planet.
Only one global tier1 provider still carries more traffic than Google (and this ISP also provides a large portion of Google’s transit).
In the graph below, I show a weighted average percentage of Internet traffic contributed by the search / mobile OS / video / cloud giant. As in earlier posts, the Google data comes from 110+ ISPs around the world participating in ATLAS. The multiple shaded colors represent different Google ASN and reflect ongoing global traffic engineering strategies.
Google now represents an average 6.4% of all Internet traffic around the world. This number grows even larger (to as much as 8-12%) if I include estimates of traffic offloaded by the increasingly common Google Global Cache (GGC) deployments and error in our data due to the extremely high degree of Google edge peering with consumer networks. Keep in mind that these numbers represent increased market share — Google is growing considerably faster than overall Internet volumes which are already increasing 40-45% each year. More data on general Internet growth trends is available in some of our earlier papers and blog posts.
While its not news that Google is Big, what is amazing is how much bigger Google continues to get.
A quick analysis of the data also shows Google now has direct peering (i.e. not transit) with more than 70% of all providers around the world (an increase of 5-10% from last year). In fact, the only remaining major group of ISPs without direct Google peering are several of the tier1s and national PTTs — many of whom will not settlement-free peer with Google due to regulatory prohibitions or commercial strategy.
While the business press may debate Google’s future (i.e. can it expand beyond search and continue its earnings growth?), for now Google’s traffic growth continues apace with massive corresponding impact on the network topology, peering arrangements and the overall Internet infrastructure.
- Craig
I agree. I thought that everyone was already using google, so it’s weird seeing their usage still growing at a significant rate. As opposed to facebook, who is also showing amazing growth each month, because they’re still rapidly expanding user base as more people finally give in and sign up. You should do one of these for facebook.