Broadband industry lobbyists and PR departments have ceaselessly predicted a bandwidth crunch that never seems to arrive, usually because they're trying to justify a new policy or rate hike, stave off regulation -- or in the case of hardware vendors, sell network management hardware. Buried beneath the roar of the "exaflood" chicken littles are more cautioned voices like that of University of Minnesota researcher Andrew Odlyzko, one of the nation's top experts on global Internet traffic. Odlyzko repeatedly notes that while growth is strong, it doesn't necessitate drastic new pricing model shifts (metered billing), or wailing to the heavens:Odlyzko estimates that average US monthly Internet traffic is between 900 and 1550 petabytes per month, up from 750 to 1250 petabytes at the end of 2007. Still, Odlyzko says there's no sign of the perpetually impending Internet collapse. "There is not a single sign of an unmanageable flood of traffic," Odlyzko says via his website, where all of his data is easily visible. "If anything, a slowdown is visible more than a speedup," he says. Odlyzko suggests that ISPs should stop fearing traffic growth and work on ways to stimulate it.