Conversion from 3 Exabits per second to Zettaoctets per second

Information about the Exabit per second (Ebit/s)

The exabit per second is a unit of data transfer rate equal to a thousand petabits per second. Its symbol is Ebit/s. No link, no cable and no exchange point runs at this rate; the unit describes the internet as a whole, or a large part of it, at a single instant.

Global internet traffic can be expressed this way. Worldwide traffic of several hundred exaoctets a month works out to roughly one exabit per second on average, and peak hours run higher. That figure is the sum of every packet moving on every network on the planet, and it is the only quantity anyone routinely describes at this scale.

An exabit per second is 125 petaoctets per second. Nothing generates data at that rate in one place; the number is an aggregate of billions of separate flows, most of them tiny. A single video stream is a few megabits per second, so an exabit per second is on the order of a hundred million such streams running at once.

The composition of that traffic is dominated by video. Streaming services account for the largest share, followed by social platforms, software updates and cloud synchronisation. Ordinary web browsing and messaging, which people think of as the internet, are a small fraction of the total by volume even though they occupy most of the attention.

The unit also appears in projections of aggregate capacity. The total installed capacity of all submarine cables, if every wavelength on every fibre pair were lit and used simultaneously, is in the exabit-per-second range. Actual utilisation is far below that, because capacity is built ahead of demand and because routes must carry each other's traffic when a cable fails.

The prefix exa is a thousand to the sixth power. It was adopted in 1975, when nobody expected it to describe anything but astronomical quantities, and it now describes the working throughput of a communications system built by human beings. The interval between definition and everyday use was about forty years.

One exabit per second equals 1,000 petabits per second, 125 petaoctets per second, or about 0.8674 exbibits per second.

Information about the Zettaoctet per second (Zo/s)

The zettaoctet per second is a unit of data transfer rate equal to a thousand exaoctets per second, or eight zettabits per second. Its symbol is Zo/s. A link running at this rate would transfer everything humanity has ever stored in well under a second, which is the clearest way to state how far beyond present engineering it lies.

The comparison is worth making carefully. Estimates of the world's total stored data run to a few hundred zettaoctets, so a zettaoctet per second would move all of it in a few minutes at most, and a substantial fraction of it every second. Nothing could produce data at that rate and nothing could store it, so the unit describes a capacity with no possible source and no possible destination.

Energy is the constraint that makes this more than a matter of engineering effort. Transmitting a bit costs energy — in the optics, in the electronics that drive them, and in the cooling that removes the waste heat. Current optical systems use on the order of a picojoule per bit end to end. At a zettaoctet per second, that works out to gigawatts of continuous power for the link alone, which is the output of several large power stations.

That figure is not a hard physical limit but an engineering one, and it has fallen steadily. The energy cost per bit of optical transmission has dropped by orders of magnitude over forty years and continues to fall. The theoretical floor, set by thermodynamics, is far lower still, so the obstacle is technique rather than physics.

The unit's practical role is in the completeness of the prefix system rather than in any application. A table of transfer rates that stops before zetta would force anyone who needed it to invent a name, and competing invented names are how measurement systems fragment. Defining the whole ladder costs nothing and prevents that.

For a converter, the arithmetic is the same as for any other prefix: a zettaoctet per second is eight zettabits per second, a thousand exaoctets, and a million petaoctets. The rule does not change because the quantity is unattainable.

One zettaoctet per second equals 1,000 exaoctets per second, 8 zettabits per second, or about 0.8470 zebioctets per second.