many people complain that they don't gain any real insight into the state of current internet traffic from most operationally collected statistics. we propose a challenge: if you leave these pages without gaining any insight into internet workloads and their impact on its evolution, send us mail to info @ nlanr.net, and we will try to come up with something you don't know yet. (or even better, you tell us something we don't know yet...)
Internet traffic data in these pages derives from samples we take from the most intuitively relevant places to which we have access. We can't offer any guarantee or even probability that they are representative of traffic in other locations or Internet traffic in general (whatever the heck that might be). 'Representative Internet traffic data' turns out to be a holy grail, for a variety of reasons, about some of which we've written stuff).
Even worse than the fact that the data is a sample whose representativeness is suspect, we typically process the raw data with programs written in perl or C, almost always by a human, and thus quite vulnerable to errors.
So, given limited available data on the nature of the Internet beast,
and the elusive search for invariants in its workload profile,
embarking on high-investment activities like building
routers or really expensive systems
grounded in these data
would be imprudent at best.
(Too bad we don't have a choice, huh.)