| Exabits per second (Ebit/s) | Zebibits per second (Zibit/s) |
|---|---|
| 1 Exabit per second | 0.000847032947254 Zibit/s |
| 2 Exabits per second | 0.00169406589451 Zibit/s |
| 3 Exabits per second | 0.00254109884176 Zibit/s |
| 4 Exabits per second | 0.00338813178902 Zibit/s |
| 5 Exabits per second | 0.00423516473627 Zibit/s |
| 10 Exabits per second | 0.00847032947254 Zibit/s |
| 20 Exabits per second | 0.0169406589451 Zibit/s |
| 25 Exabits per second | 0.0211758236814 Zibit/s |
| 50 Exabits per second | 0.0423516473627 Zibit/s |
| 100 Exabits per second | 0.0847032947254 Zibit/s |
| Reference | Exabits per second (Ebit/s) | Zebibits per second (Zibit/s) |
|---|---|---|
| A dial-up modem | 5.6 × 10-14 Ebit/s | 4.74338 × 10-17 Zibit/s |
| Typical home broadband | 1 × 10-10 Ebit/s | 8.47033 × 10-14 Zibit/s |
| Gigabit Ethernet | 0.000000001 Ebit/s | 8.47033 × 10-13 Zibit/s |
| Streaming a 4K film | 2.5 × 10-11 Ebit/s | 2.11758 × 10-14 Zibit/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.
The zebibit per second is a unit of data transfer rate equal to two to the seventieth power bits per second, which is 1,024 exbibits per second. Its symbol is Zibit/s. It is the binary counterpart of the zettabit per second, and the two differ by 18.1 per cent — approaching a fifth.
Nothing runs at this rate, and nothing is designed to. A zebibit per second is about a thousand times the total instantaneous traffic of the internet, and it would move the world's entire stock of stored data in a matter of minutes. The unit exists because the IEC series, like the metric series it parallels, was defined completely rather than only as far as anyone then needed.
That completeness is a deliberate design principle rather than an oversight. A measurement system whose names run out at some arbitrary point forces every future user to improvise an extension, and improvised extensions conflict with one another. Defining the whole ladder in advance costs nothing and removes the possibility.
The eighteen per cent gap at this level is the clearest illustration of why the binary series was needed at all. At the kibibit the two conventions differed by 2.4 per cent, which nobody noticed; the discrepancy multiplies by 1.024 at each step, and by here it is large enough that no reader could treat the two labels as interchangeable even in casual writing.
In octets a zebibit per second is 147,573,952,589,676,412,928, or 128 exbioctets per second. Expressing the same rate in every unit on the scale is an exercise rather than an application, but it is one a converter has to perform correctly, because the arithmetic does not become approximate when the quantity becomes unreachable.
The practical lesson is the one the whole binary series teaches: the lowercase i is not optional. It is the only mark in a written figure that distinguishes a power of two from a power of ten, and by this point in the scale the two are nearly a fifth apart.
One zebibit per second equals 1,024 exbibits per second, 147,573,952,589,676,412,928 octets per second, or about 1.181 zettabits per second.