Comment by jstummbillig

1 year ago

I have absolutely no idea how that number relates to any comparable operation. Can anyone add a banana for scale?

Assuming it's a constant data transfer rate, this is 3,889 Gbps. This is

- About 4,000 customers worth of maxed out Gigabit internet

- ~243,000 simultaneous Netflix 4K streams

- 1.6% the capacity of the latest BlueMed undersea fiber cable

According to a quick search the average US household is closing in on 600 GB of traffic per month, that makes 42 PB per day the internet traffic of 2.1 million households. Incidentally the second picture in the article says 2.3M+ customers. With an US average of 2.5 people per household that is the traffic of 5 million people or 1.5 % of the US population.

EMBL-EBI’s open transfer systems provide ~5PB of data each month.

ftp.ebi.ac.uk for example.

If you've got a laptop with a terrabyte drive, it would be 42,000 full laptops worth of data.

10 minutes of 4k video is ~30GB.

  • Knowing the size of a video file is exactly not the information, that would help me put this number in a meaningful perspective with any comparable operation.

    How do I think of 42 petabytes in terms of an ISP? Is that a lot? How does it compare to other satellite providers? How does it compare to 4G capacities? Is this a small country worth of traffic or just any ol' data center? I have no intuition about traffic at this scale.

  • I feel like this is a bad example.

    Most people's experience with 4K video is through a streaming service, and 10 minutes of 4K video on a streaming service is more like 1-1.5 GB.

    Or a UHD Disc perhaps where 10 minutes is 3.5-7 GB.