How big is the Internet?

Graph: Internet only traffic forecast. Data collated from CISCO, IDS and Wikipedia sources.

This morning, I was wondering about the size of the Internet. It is big and it is another example of exponential change and growth: Cisco estimates that annual Internet and other IP traffic will multiply 5 times between now and 2013, to about 667 Exabytes, actually.

Exabytes?

Yes, that was my reaction, too.

So I got curious and thought I would see how the byte relate to each other. And share it with you.

Meet the Byte family.

Bit (born 1948)

The bit is an artificial word that come from combining the words binary and digit. The bit goes back to the origins of computing when information was still stored on punchcards. A bit can be a 1 or a 0, a TRUE or FALSE.

Byte - Usually consists of 8 bits. It is sometimes (and in France all the time) called octet.

Kilobyte - (1000 bytes, or 1024 bytes, depending on whether you consider the decimal or binary system. Computer storage is usually calculated in the binary system, hence the sometimes odd configuration data that come with hard disks).

Megabyte - 10² bytes. About 500 pages of text, or approximately 1 minute of compressed MP3 music. A standard CD holds between 650 and 800 MB). The old 3.5° computer floppy disks used to hold 1.4MB.

Gigabyte - (10³ bytes, about 1000MB). About one hour of standard resolution TV or about 7 minutes of HDTV. A standard DVD holds 4.7 GB. A drawer full (about 600) of those floppy disks. The new BlueRay disks hold 50GB.

Terabyte (10⁴ bytes). The standard desktop hard drive today is 1TB. It holds about 150 CDs. As of May 2009, the Library of Congress has collected almost 100 terabytes of data. (From LoC website).

Petabyte - (10⁵ bytes). Today, Google processes about 20PB of data each day (Wikipedia). In 2006, Kevin Kelly of Wired Magazine wrote in an article in the New York Times: 

"From the days of Sumerian clay tablets till now, humans have "published" at least 32 million books, 750 million articles and essays, 25 million songs, 500 million images, 500,000 movies, 3 million videos, TV shows and short films and 100 billion public Web pages. All this material is currently contained in all the libraries and archives of the world. When fully digitized, the whole lot could be compressed (at current technological rates) onto 50 petabyte hard disks.

Exabyte - (10⁶ bytes) According to a CISCO white paper, annual global IP traffic will exceed 667 exabytes by 2013. 

"Last year's forecast anticipated a run rate of 522 exabytes per year in 2012. The economic downturn has only slightly tempered traffic growth, and this year's forecast predicts 510 exabytes per year in 2012, growing to 667 exabytes per year or 56 exabytes per month in 2013. Global IP traffic will quintuple from 2008 to 2013. Overall, IP traffic will grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 40 percent" (from CISCO Website).

The world's computers stored approximately 160EB in 2006 (IDC).

One exabyte is the equivalent of about 50,000 years of DVD quality video. In early 2007, the Wall Street Journal talked about the coming Exaflood.

Zettabyte - (10⁷ bytes). Now it gets hairy. This is the equivalent of 1 billion of today's TB hard disks as described above. A billion.

1ZB: It is estimated that that will be the size of the digital universe in 2010 (IDC).

42ZB: All human speech ever spoken. Estimate by Mark Liberman via Wikipedia).

Yottabyte (10⁸ bytes. We are not quite there yet. 

But we have the word, and so the real thing cannot be that far away…