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So how much information does the Internet hold? There are three ways to look at that question, said Martin Hilbert, a professor of communications at the University of California, Davis.
"The Internet stores information, the Internet communicates information and the Internet computes information," Hilbert told Live Science. The communication capacity of the Internet can be measured by how much information it can transfer, or how much information it does transfer at any given time, he said.
In 2014, researchers published a study in the journal Supercomputing Frontiers and Innovations estimating the storage capacity of the Internet at 10^24 bytes, or 1 million exabytes. A byte is a data unit comprising 8 bits, and is equal to a single character in one of the words you're reading now. An exabyte is 1 billion billion bytes.
One way to estimate the communication capacity of the Internet is to measure the traffic moving through it. According to Cisco's Visual Networking Index initiative, the Internet is now in the "zettabyte era." A zettabyte equals 1 sextillion bytes, or 1,000 exabytes. By the end of 2016, global Internet traffic will reach 1.1 zettabytes per year, according to Cisco, and by 2019, global traffic is expected to hit 2 zettabytes per year.
One zettabyte is the equivalent of 36,000 years of high-definition video, which, in turn, is the equivalent of streaming Netflix's entire catalog 3,177 times, Thomas Barnett Jr., Cisco's director of thought leadership, wrote in a 2011 blog post about the company's findings.
In 2011, Hilbert and his colleagues published a paper in the journal Science estimating the communication capacity of the Internet at 3 x 10^12 kilobits per second, a measure of bandwidth. This was based on hardware capacity, and not on how much information was actually being transferred at any moment.
In one particularly offbeat study, an anonymous hacker measured the size of the Internet by counting how many IPs (Internet Protocols) were in use. IPs are the wayposts of the Internet through which data travels, and each device online has at least one IP address. According to the hacker's estimate, there were 1.3 billion IP addresses used online in 2012.
The Internet has vastly altered the data landscape. In 2000, before Internet use became ubiquitous, telecommunications capacity was 2.2 optimally compressed exabytes, Hilbert and his colleagues found. In 2007, the number was 65. This capacity includes phone networks and voice calls as well as access to the enormous information reservoir that is the Internet. However, data traffic over mobile networks was already outpacing voice traffic in 2007, the researchers found.
Hilbert and his colleagues took their own stab at visualizing the world's information. In their 2011 Science paper, they calculated that the information capacity of the world's analog and digital storage was 295 optimally compressed exabytes. To store 295 exabytes on CD-ROMS would require a stack of discs reaching to the moon (238,900 miles, or 384,400 kilometers), and then a quarter of the distance from the Earth to the moon again, the researchers wrote. That's a total distance of 298,625 miles (480,590 km). By 2007, 94 percent of information was digital, meaning that the world's digital information alone would overshoot the moon if stored on CD-ROM. It would stretch 280,707.5 miles (451,755 km).
The Internet's size is a moving target, Hilbert said, but it's growing by leaps and bounds. There's just one saving grace when it comes to this deluge of information: Our computing capacity is growing even faster than the amount of data we store.
While world storage capacity doubles every three years, world computing capacity doubles every year and a half, Hilbert said. In 2011, humanity could carry out 6.4 x 10^18 instructions per second with all of its computers — similar to the number of nerve impulses per second in the human brain. Five years later, computational power is up in the ballpark of about eight human brains. That doesn't mean, of course, that eight people in a room could outthink the world's computers. In many ways, artificial intelligence already outperforms human cognitive capacity (though A.I. is still far from mimicking general, humanlike intelligence). Online, artificial intelligence determines which Facebook posts you see, what comes up in a Google search and even 80 percent of stock market transactions. The expansion of computing power is the only thing making the explosion of data online useful, Hilbert said.
"We're going from an information age to a knowledge age," he said.
http://www.livescience.com/54094-how-big-is-the-internet.html
