Diffusion of network innovation : implications for adoption of internet services

The Internet and network applications have achieved significant growth. This thesis reviews the historical development of the Internet and projects future expansion of network application usage. Observed data points for Internet hosts, World Wide Web servers, the Multicasting Backbone, USENET, and Internet telephony were fit to an s-shaped logistic curve. The results of the model predict the applications’ growth rate, halfway points of growth, and saturation limits. The number of Internet hosts is expected saturate at about 39 million hosts by the early part of the next century, while the number of Web servers will saturate at about 40% of responding Internet hosts. The adoption rate of Internet Telephony was estimated by analogy to adoption patterns of more established applications. The factors necessary for successful deployment of Internet telephony were addressed in terms of network architecture and user interface. Internet telephony and multicast applications that require reserved network resources were concluded to be in very early stages of development. At the time of this writing, only a small fraction of the users who have knowledge and have tried telephony applications are willing to adopt and actively use the technology. This indicates that augmentations to Internet services are necessary to improve the usability of realtime applications, such as Internet telephony.