Remember Metcalfe’s Law meets market reality? Here is new wrinkle to that argument. Folks at Nielsen/Net Ratings say that the total usage of this thing called the Internet might have peaked in the mature markets. The report says that the amount of time spent online at home in countries such as US, Germany, United Kingdom and Switzerland is showing minimal to flat growth. In US the Internet usage at home declined 2%. In other words if your business depends on online growth in usage and total number of users, well you need to tweak your business models. The tier two countries like France, Italy, Hong Kong and Japan are still growing, however at double digit rates. Clearly, there are signs that there is a limit to how much a network can be used. That argument will gain credibility as time goes by – after all time does put all axioms to test… eventually.
I’m not sure we can read much into this. The value people get from the Net might not correlate very well with how much time they spend on it. For example, moving from dial-up to broadband will help you spend less time drumming your fingers. People get to know what services they need, and spend less time exploring. And usability of web sites and client apps improves, so people spend less time dealing with the mechanics. Increasing amount of value comes from things like TiVos which connect to the Net on your behalf. And so on.
Minutes of use might not be the best measure of broadband…
I agree with you on most points martin, i think what we are seeing is peaking of internet 1.0, as we knew it – the one that needed email and web interface. the network is morphing into one which relies more on machine2machine communications and is becoming more of an organic network.