About 43 million unique machines are connected to the Internet, according to the latest edition of a biannual survey that measures these things.
The Net's annual rate of growth remains about 46 percent, according to the survey released Sunday by Network Wizards. Twice a year the consulting company runs a program that crawls the Net, counting hosts.
In an analysis of the growth curve, Tony Rutkowski of the Next Generation Internet Association said Tuesday the number of connected hosts will reach the 100 million mark by the second quarter of 2001.
Rutkowski said that while the numbers confirm what everyone expected, the Network Wizards survey is unique since it is based on actual measurements, rather than predictions, of the growth trends on the Internet.
"Growth in educational domains is relatively flat while growth in the commercial network domains is extremely high," Rutkowski said. "A lot of this is intuitive, but it does confirm people's intuition. [The survey] has been consistently done over a very long period of time. It's not an estimate, these are actual measurements."
He added that one important trend depicted in the survey is the growth rates in other than well-connected Western nations.
"The Internet growth trend continues, but it's continuing everywhere in the world," Rutkowski said.
The top domain is predictably .com, which grew 18 percent to reach 12,140,747. The domains .edu and .net saw growth rates of 13 percent and 26 percent, respectively, for second and third place.
Although those three still command the most hosts, the highest growth rates were in international domains. Taiwan's domain (.tw) grew 198 percent to 308,676 hosts. Puerto Rico (.pr) grew 1,177 percent to 1,571.
"There don't appear to be any surprises," said Network Wizards' Mark Lottor in an email. "[It's the] same old stuff, really."
