Telegeography claims that, during 2004, the amount of net traffic travelling on backbone cables between nations grew by 104%. Compare this with 2005, which has seen growth slump to 49%.

One reason could be the result of a global slowdown in broadband uptake, representing a degree of market maturity. Typically this is more likely to be a factor in Europe/USA than growing Asian nations:

Just how fast net traffic has grown over the last few years can be seen via statistics from the London Internet Exchange (Linx), where more than 150 net service firms swap data between each other.

In a little over a year the amount of traffic flowing across Linx has risen from approximately 30 gigabits per second to more than 67 Gbit/s. In 2000 it was barely hitting 5 Gbit/s, the equivalent of a DVD film every 10 seconds.

Alan Mauldin, senior research analyst, said that in any other field annual growth of 49% would be incredible. It was only the fact that the net had grown so fast, so quickly for so long that now made such a figure less impressive.

We recall a similar situation with unmetered dialup services, suggesting that broadband products are following much the same path.

The question thus becomes, how long before growth stagnates? We’d unscientifically guesstimate 2/3 years. More @ BBC News Online.