Networks run at ~26% average utilization globally; Internet2 maintains 50% headroom by policy

TeleGeography's State of the Network (2023-2025 editions) measures global average IP bandwidth utilization at approximately 26%, with peaks at ~44%. The remaining ~74% of networking capacity is unused at any given moment. Cisco's Annual Internet Report (2018-2023) and TeleGeography's WAN Manager Survey corroborate the same range across enterprise and research networks.

For C-0006, the implication is that protocol-level distribution traffic — which is bursty and asynchronous by design — fits inside the existing 74% of unused network capacity without requiring any additional bandwidth provisioning. A BitTorrent seeder, a Tor relay, an IPFS pinning node, or a Matrix homeserver running at the institution adds traffic that the network is already provisioned to carry.

This pairs with E-0073 (idle server capacity) and E-0075 (flat-rate bandwidth contracts) to establish that the marginal cost of Tier 3 on existing institutional infrastructure approaches zero across all three resource axes — compute, network, and contracted bandwidth.