Metcalfe's Law after 40 Years of Ethernet

Abstract

Critics have declared Metcalfe's law, which states that the value of a network grows as the square of the number of its users, a gross overestimation of the network effect, but nobody has tested the law with real data. Using a generalization of the sigmoid function called the netoid, Ethernet's inventor and the law's originator models Facebook user growth over the past decade and fits his law to the associated revenue. The Web extra at http://youtu.be/m_agCPNGOzU is a video interview with Bob Metcalfe about the creation of the first Ethernet local area network 40 years ago at Xerox Palo Alto Research Center.