Salutations telecom thinkers ! In the past I posted a blog to explain the measurements of the digital era. What I want to tell you about today, is how traffic trends are quickly moving us into the Zettacosm. So, the first order of business is to explain just what this means – and provide you with a solid footing to understanding how the zettabyte flood is affecting our lives going forward – whether professional or personal. New forms of data are transforming the Internet, in terms of usage and capabilities. The dominance of rich media, video, and interactive multimedia traffic are driving the transformation of network architectures as well as commercial business plans. It is this world of visual and sensory communications that signals the need to prepare for the Zettabyte flood.
So – what exactly is a “zetta”? Technically, Zetta means 10 to the 21st power – that is, a billion trillion. When dealing with content and storage - the measure is Zettabytes – when talking about data transmission, we talk about Zetta bits per second. But –how many of us truly relate to the mathematical definitions? What we need are examples in real world terms. So to help you understand these dimensions, I offer these real-life examples.
• 1MB = one digital chest x-ray, or one minute of high-fidelity sound
• 1GB = one pickup truck full of books, or one symphony in high-fidelity sound, or one broadcast movie
• 1TB = all the X-ray films in a large technological hospital, or 50,000 trees made into paper and printed, or daily rate of EOS (Earth Orbiting System) data (1998)
• 1PB = 50,000,000 trees made into paper and printed
• 1EB = one billion pickup trucks full of books, or one trillion books (400 pages each)
• 1ZB = 250 million DVDs
Now that you understand what the measurements mean – the next question is what is the source of all this data? By 2015, estimates of annual traffic in the U.S. alone are projected to equal over 1 Zettabyte. According to the Discovery Institute, the sources of this traffic are as follows: (these are annual figures)
Movie downloads and P2P file sharing 100EB
Video calling and virtual windows 400EB
Cloud computing and remote backup 50EB
Internet video gaming and virtual worlds 200EB
Non-Internet IPTV >100EB
Business IP traffic 100EB
Phone, web, email, photos, music 50EB
The result will be an U.S. Internet that is 50x larger than it was in 2006! And that is just in the U.S.
Globally, Internet traffic is estimated to show a CAGR of 42% from 2007-2012, and Non-Internet IP traffic will show a CAGR of 55% from 2007-2012. For a comprehensive analysis of these trends I refer you to Cisco’s Visual Networking Index – Forecast and Methodology, 2007-2012. And for a wonderful review of the changing applications, make sure to read the Discovery Institute’s Estimating the Exaflood.
It is estimated that implementing the required changes will require a global new investment in the worldwide Internet infrastructure of US$137 billion by 2010. At least US$50 billion in the U.S. alone, which is currently lagging Asia. The next few years will require a capacity increase in access networks by a factor of 10 to 100, replacing today’s 1 and 10 Mbps links with 25 Mbps and 100 Mbps links.
So, welcome to the Zettacosm – and prepare for the Zettabyte flood!
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