The company Arbor Networks, in cooperation with University of Michigan, has created a report called “2009 Internet Observatory Report“.
In the report, they conclude that after having studied over 256 exabytes worth of traffic (I’ll explain how much that is, in just a bit…), that half of that traffic comes from just 150 companies. Just two years ago, half of the Internet traffic came from 5,000 – 10,000 companies.
Top 30 of those 150 companies accounts for 30% of the entire Internet traffic. Among those 30 companies you’ll find companies such as Google, Facebook and Yahoo.
The reason for the change in companies responsible for half the traffic, is because more and more content is being consolidated into cloud-based systems, says Craig Labovits, CEO of Arbor Networks.
In 2008, Cisco said that all traffic on the Internet was less than 7 exabytes per month in 2007 and they predict it will increase to 44 exabytes per month in 2012.
How much is 1 exabyte, then? Well, it’s easy to just throw out a number so let’s do that first. One Exabyte is 1 million terabytes and 1 terabyte is 1024 megabytes.
Exabytes are the “next step” after petabytes and to explain petabytes, mozy.com made this great image to really explain how much a petabyte is. Basically 1 petabyte is equal to 13.3 years of HD-TV video. I guess by now it’s impossible to imagine just how much 1 exabyte really is 🙂
Click on the image to view it in a larger size over at mozy.com
Where is the actual article? I wouldn’t mind reading that 🙂
.-= Brad Ney´s last blog ..Bouncing Higher than 80%? Heres 7 Ways To Reduce Your Blog’s Bounce Rate =-.
Sorry, forgot to add link 🙂 will add later when I’m not on my iPhone.
But here it is, the report: http://www.nanog.org/meetings/nanog47/abstracts.php?pt=MTQ1MyZuYW5vZzQ3&nm=nanog47
Interesting but not really that surprising. When you look at Internet companies like Google and their properties such as YouTube, Microsoft and associated properties, Facebook, Yahoo and their properties, and Amazon’s properties, it all adds up quickly. I would expect the sites with the most video would gobble up the most bandwidth.
Where can I get one of those 5 Exabyte hard disk drives? 😉