A new report indicates that internet use is expected to double annually over the next 5 years. And this isn't just a widening net of grandma and grandpas getting their rocks off on email and yahoo games, but serious porn fiends and hardcore gamers. At least that is what I'm lead to believe by the prediction that broadband consumers will constitute 60% of the traffic on the net in 5 years (and the article thankfully points out that the other 40% would be business users. These folks are sharp. So sharp that they provide "a five-year forecast of global Internet traffic growth over the next five years". Don't cut yourself!)
To put this in perspective, they explain the amount of data transfers in terms of terabytes and petabits. They expect traffic to increase from 180 petabits per day in 2002 to 5,175 petabits per day by the end of 2007. Ignore the fancy word and focus on the increase from 180 to 5,175. Not a bad return if on an investment. Now realize that the fancy word is the alphabet version of 15 zeros. That's right, in 2002 the daily average traffic on the entire net was 180,000,000,000,000,000 bits, but that will increase to 5,175,000,000,000,000,000 bits in 5 years. Boo-yah!
But just as we got burned when we realized that a 56k modem is really only 7K (kilobits vs kilobytes with 8 bits to a byte), the numbers aren't quite that big. 180,000,000,000,000,000 bits is 22,500,000,000,000,000 bytes and 5,175,000,000,000,000,000 bits is 646,875,000,000,000,000 bytes. But who thinks in terms of bytes anymore than in bits?
By definition, a kilobyte is 1000 bytes (let's play metric, not binary calculation, mmkay?) so 22,500,000,000,000,000 bytes can be thought of 22,500,000,000,000 K, which would take you 321,4285,714,286 minutes (assuming a constant stream of theoretical peak speeds of 7K in your modem) or 53,571,428,571 hours or 2,232,142,857 days or 6,115,459 years to download. That's one day of traffic in 2002 and it takes your pathetic lose ass over 6 million years to download it. No wonder peeps want broadband!
Something odd I just noticed as I wrote up those numbers is that the string of 857 was in each of the minutes, hours, and days numbers. Oddly enough, (8-5) - (5-7) = 5 and the Law of Fives strikes again.
As much as I seek to enlighten your experience here, I will resist the desire to break down the bandwidth traffic predicted in 2007 and leave that as an exercise for those readers who really are interested in getting some hands on expertise in calculator button pushing.
To approach this from a different angle, we'll look at the 2002 daily number again where we left off: 22,500,000,000,000 K. This can be simplified by breaking down into Megabytes (22,500,000,000) or Gigabytes (22,500,000,000). I'd go into Terabytes, but then we'd back in the realm of fancy language which is what this whole exercise is supposed to dispel.
What this means is that if you had six million one hundred and fifteen thousand four hundred and fifty nine years available to download a days worth of traffic in 2002, you'd need twenty billion five hundred million Gigs of drive space to download it on to. To make it easy, we'll assume you have 100 GB drives in your server, which means you'd only need 225 million hard drives! Yay for small numbers!!!
I think I've taken this exercise way to far already and probably made a mistake in my calculations very early on that rendered my results meaningless. And as I wrap this up, I realize that I didn't even get to the point I was originally trying to make with the title, which is mainly with more and more stuff getting bandied about and assuming that more content gets added instead of the possiblity that the increased traffic is just due to more and more people downloading the same content from 2002, there will be even more information made available to me that I will not be able to read. Factor in the signal to noise ration (this blog is all about masking signals) and the probability that a majority of those sites will be written in Chinese, and it makes the nuggets of goodness that we eventually tumble across all the more to be cherished.
Posted by Nutrimentia at March 2, 2003 01:51 PM