Silicon.com quotes Cisco CEO John Chambers' presentation at ITU Telecom World in Hong Kong that by 2015, the monthly volume of Internet traffic will reach 15 Exabytes (that's 15 million TB). Wikipedia says as of the end of 1999, the sum of all human knowledge (including all text as well as audio/video recordings) only amounted to 12.6 million TB. The blogosphere and YouTube might have increased that figure somewhat...
Back in 2003, when I first joined EV1Servers (or Rackshack, at the time), I was impressed to learn that the company's network was responsible for carrying 2% of all Internet traffic. If we assume that the % was and will continue to be accurate, the same network will be hit with 114 GB/second in data transfer within less than a decade (and that's just average rather than peak usage). 114 GB/sec = full utilization of 912 GigEs, isn't it? Yikes.
Help me double check my math, please. 15 million TB divided by ~2.6 million seconds per month = 5.7 TB per second of worldwide usage. 2% of 5.7 TB is 114 GB/sec. 114 GB x8 is 912 gigabits/sec. Does that sound right?
And by the way, John Chambers says his estimate could turn out to be conservative. Which could be the case:
ThePlanet-EV1Servers recently announced plans to boost network capacity to 100 Gbps, and Dan Golding from Tier 1 Research says he expects Internet traffic to continue doubling each year. This GigaOm write-up last year suggests that bandwidth capacity should be 2x peak traffic. And based on EV1's network graphs, does 3/4 seem like a reasonable guess-timate of average to peak ratio? If we put all these figures together, the company's network could have 4800 Gbps of average utilization by 2015. That's crazy!
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