Editing Network effect (section)

===Limits to growth===

Network growth is generally not infinite, and tends to plateau when it reaches [[market saturation]] (all customers have already joined) or [[diminishing returns]] make acquisition of the last few customers too costly.

Networks can also stop growing or collapse if they do not have enough capacity to handle growth. For example, an overloaded phone network that has so many customers that it becomes congested, leading to [[busy signal]]s, the inability to get a [[dial tone]], and poor [[customer support]]. This creates a risk that customers will defect to a rival network because of the inadequate capacity of the existing system. After this point, each additional user decreases the value obtained by every other user.

[[Peer-to-peer]] (P2P) systems are networks designed to distribute load among their user pool. This theoretically allows P2P networks to scale indefinitely. The P2P based telephony service [[Skype]] benefits from this effect and its growth is limited primarily by market saturation.<ref>{{Cite journal|last1=Gunduz|first1=Gurhan|last2=Yuksel|first2=Murat|date=2016-05-08|title=Popularity-based scalable peer-to-peer topology growth|url=http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1389128616300391|journal=Computer Networks|language=en|volume=100|pages=124–140|doi=10.1016/j.comnet.2016.02.017|issn=1389-1286}}</ref>