The NYT today carried a story that says many of the things we have been talking about for the past two years.

Tracking the speed of Internet service is becoming more and more important as everyone asks the Internet to do more than handle e-mail messages and Web pages. A few lines of text can take its time arriving, but applications sending voice calls or streaming video become unusable if there is too much delay in delivery.

Some Web sites and software packages let users test the speed of data through their Internet service provider, or I.S.P. All the providers offer a glimpse at the quality of the connection, but that information is just one bit of data; each new request for a Web site or a file involves dozens of computers, and any of them could be a weak link.

“Even in Web browsing, pages are getting more complicated,” Professor Odlyzko said. “You click on a link and you end up setting dozens of connections. Ads are being served. You end up doing a database lookup. Any extra latency gets compounded because you have many, many stages.”

The difference between the QoSE problem in the US and the rest of the world is that they live practically inside the Internet cloud. The entire discussion about what the ISP is responsible for does not apply in our parts, where the ISP has to get us to the Internet cloud through Singapore or wherever. ISP’s responsibility is not limited to the ISP domain, but extends to the first landing in the continental US (a point we took from the Singapore IDA). When we used the AT Tester in N America, we tested it using sites in Europe.

Panic over, then? Not quite. Perversely, the real threat may come from a reduction in internet-traffic growth, says Dr Odlyzko. Too little internet traffic, he contends, could prove to be more dangerous to the industry than too much. A traffic-growth rate of 50%, combined with steady declines in equipment costs, means revenues are stagnant, “which is hardly a cheering prospect for the industry”. If traffic growth continues to fall—it is already below 10% in Hong Kong, where high-speed access is abundant—there will be slowing demand for faster connections from operators and new equipment from vendors. But if compelling new applications drive the growth rate back up to 100%, its level for many years, there will be more demand from customers for new services and equipment. Accordingly, says Dr Odlyzko, the industry should be looking for ways to stimulate traffic growth, rather than limit it.