In many cases, growth has been orderly. 4 shows the average traffic from the public Internet to the University of Waterloo. The observations of the preceding section provide strong evidence in favor of the hypothesis that one can build a best effort stateless backbone network that will offer high quality transport to all traffic primarily through low utilization. We find that for a variety of institutions, some with abundant bandwidth, others with congested links, traffic tends to about double each year. Instead, it continues growing at about 100 per year.
Malicious behavior is a smaller problem than is often feared.
What dominates is the time it takes for new applications and processes to be widely adopted. This is not to imply that usage pricing schemes are of little utility. When compared to a situation with no usage constraining charges, usage charges greatly increase the efficiency of the network. Our point is merely that such pricing schemes do not achieve true optimality, and that the significant efficiency gains demonstrated could probably also be achieved with explicitly suboptimal schemes. Technical report, University of Texas at Austin, 1995.