Authors:

  • Shane Greenstein

Excerpt

2020, Book Chapter, "This internet barely existed in a commercial sense 25 years ago. In the mid1990s, when the data packets travelled to users over dial-up, the main internet traffic consisted of email, file transfer, and a few web applications. For such content, users typically could tolerate delays. Of course, the internet today is a vast and interconnected system of software applications and computing devices, which society uses to exchange information and services to support business, shopping, and leisure. Not only does data traffic for streaming, video, and gaming applications comprise the majority of traffic for internet service providers and reach users primarily through broadband lines, but typically those users would not tolerate delays in these applications (for usage statistics, see Nevo, Turner, and Williams 2016; McManus et al. 2018; Huston 2017)."

Non-HKS Author Website - Shane Greenstein