Internet traffic statistics

This is an Economist article about whether the internet can survive rocketing traffic or not. It argues (well) that in fact infrastructure easily keeps up with increasing traffic requirements.

However, there were quite a few cool facts and statistics peppered around the article:

  • YouTube alone generated more traffic in 2006 than the entire internet in 2000! Imagine what it’s like now…
  • It is estimated that 50-60% of all internet traffic today is video. That has already been the case for three years
  • Global internet traffic is between 5 and 8 exabytes. An exabyte is 1 billion (1,000,000,000) gigabytes!

That’s a lot of 1’s and 0’s. It’s going to be fun