WASHINGTON, D.C. -- Broadband for America (BfA) - a coalition of over 300 members - today released a new study by Analysys Mason Limited, a global telecommunications consulting company, entitled, "Overview of Recent Changes in the IP Interconnection Ecosystem." The study examines the Internet’s inherent flexibility and adaptability despite the profound changes in its basic structure since it changed from largely a tool for academic institutions to a commercially available platform over 15 years ago.

The study documents the profound changes that have taken place since April of 1995, when the Internet was fully commercialized. At that time, most Internet access was through a dial-up modem and the Internet was mainly used for file transfer, email was simple text, while the Web was not yet multimedia. In the ensuing years, traffic has not only increased by many orders of magnitude with the advent of broadband access, but the nature of that traffic, and the underlying infrastructure, has changed as higher quality video and more and more forms of "premium content"　 predominate.

The study describes how, in the more than 15 years since the commercialization of the Internet backbone, the framework for commercially negotiated interconnection arrangements that undergird the Internet ecosystem continues to successfully adapt to the Internet’s fundamental nature of continual evolution and change . The author, Michael Kende, who is a partner with Analysys Mason, concludes that "the Internet has shown itself to be able to adapt well to these rapid and profound market changes without regulatory intervention, in contrast to telecommunications where regulation is typically much slower to implement changes in interconnection arrangements."

About Broadband for America

Broadband for America (BfA) is a growing coalition of over 300 members ranging from independent consumer advocacy groups, to content and application providers, to the companies which build and maintain the Internet. The complete BfA membership list is available at:　http://www.broadbandforamerica.com/about/members　

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