not truly part of the Internet, but use IP, the Internet Protocol, such as the IPTV services of various telecom firms)". The MINTS estimate of US national backbone traffic for 2004, which may be interpolated as 200 petabytes/month, is a plausible three-fold multiple of the traffic of the US's largest backbone carrier, Level(3) Inc., which claims an average traffic level of 60 petabytes/month. Edholm's law Internet bandwidth in telecommunication networks has been doubling every 18 months, an observation expressed as Edholm's law. This follows the advances in semiconductor technology, such as metal-oxide-silicon (MOS) scaling, exemplified by the MOSFET transistor, which has shown similar scaling described by Moore's law. In the 1980s, fiber-optical technology using laser light as information carriers accelerated the transmission speed and bandwidth of telecommunication circuits. This has led to the bandwidths of communication networks achieving terabit per second transmission speeds. See also ETOMIC Internet rush hour Web traffic Zettabyte Era Traffic flow References Further reading External links "The Size and Growth Rate of the Internet", K.G. Coffman and Andrew Odlyzki, First Monday, Volume 3, Number 5, October 1998 Internet Traffic Report from AnalogX Internet Health Report from Keynote Systems Cooperative Association for Internet Data Analysis (CAIDA), based at the University of California, San Diego Supercomputer Center Computer network analysis