Firefox 3 has been download roughly 8.3 million times in a 24 hour period as part of their download day. This number equates to around 83 terabytes of data served up by the fleet of Firefox servers. That same amount of data would be contained in 8 1/2 full copies of the US Library of Congress’ print collection. This is a truly impressive feat and just goes to show how large the internet has become. At its peak, the total bandwidth consumed by downloads was 20 gigabits/sec.
Full Article: Data Center Knowledge
Cisco Systems, the San Jose, Calif.-based company that makes a living selling plumbing for the Internet (amongst other things), has come out with a prediction: Traffic on the world’s networks will increase (annually) 46 percent from 2007 to 2012, nearly doubling every two years. As a result, there will be an annual bandwidth demand of approximately 522 exabytes2, or more than half a zettabyte.
- Global IP traffic will reach 44 exabytes per month in 2012, compared to less than seven per month in 2007. In 2002, global IP traffic was five exabytes, which means that the volume of IP traffic in 2012 will be 100 times as large.
- Monthly global IP traffic in December 2012 will be 11 exabytes higher than in December 2011, a single-year increase that will exceed the amount by which traffic has increased in the eight years since 2000.
- Mobile data traffic will roughly double each year from 2008 through 2012. U.S. will surpass Japan in mobile traffic in 2009. (I guess thanks to the iPhone.)
- In 2012, Internet video traffic alone will be 400 times the traffic carried by the U.S. Internet backbone in 2000. Representative of this trend, Internet video has jumped to 22 percent of the global consumer Internet traffic in 2007 from 12 percent in 2006. Video-on-demand, IPTV, peer-to-peer (P2P) video, and Internet video are forecast to account for nearly 90 percent of all consumer IP traffic in 2012.
Full Article: Gigaom
Very interesting article. I have always wondered just how much bandwidth the internet uses annually and it is quite a bit. We were have come quite a way from the dial up days when everyone’s home connection was very slow. Now the internet can bring all sorts of media and entertainment to you with just a click of your mouse.