| Exabits per second (Ebit/s) | Zebioctets per second (Zio/s) |
|---|---|
| 1 Exabit per second | 0.000105879118407 Zio/s |
| 2 Exabits per second | 0.000211758236814 Zio/s |
| 3 Exabits per second | 0.00031763735522 Zio/s |
| 4 Exabits per second | 0.000423516473627 Zio/s |
| 5 Exabits per second | 0.000529395592034 Zio/s |
| 10 Exabits per second | 0.00105879118407 Zio/s |
| 20 Exabits per second | 0.00211758236814 Zio/s |
| 25 Exabits per second | 0.00264697796017 Zio/s |
| 50 Exabits per second | 0.00529395592034 Zio/s |
| 100 Exabits per second | 0.0105879118407 Zio/s |
| Reference | Exabits per second (Ebit/s) | Zebioctets per second (Zio/s) |
|---|---|---|
| A dial-up modem | 5.6 × 10-14 Ebit/s | 5.92923 × 10-18 Zio/s |
| Typical home broadband | 1 × 10-10 Ebit/s | 1.05879 × 10-14 Zio/s |
| Gigabit Ethernet | 0.000000001 Ebit/s | 1.05879 × 10-13 Zio/s |
| Streaming a 4K film | 2.5 × 10-11 Ebit/s | 2.64698 × 10-15 Zio/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 zebioctet per second is a unit of data transfer rate equal to 1,024 exbioctets per second, or two to the seventieth power octets per second. Its symbol is Zio/s. It is the binary counterpart of the zettaoctet per second, and the two differ by 18.1 per cent.
A link running at this rate would transfer everything humanity has ever stored several times over in a single second. That is the plainest way to describe how far it lies beyond anything that exists, is planned, or has been seriously proposed. The unit is a name for a quantity, not a description of a thing.
It is worth being precise about why such names are still defined. A measurement system is a set of rules, and the value of a rule is that it applies without exception. The moment a system says that certain prefix-and-unit combinations are legal and others are not, every user must carry a table instead of a rule, and different users will carry different tables. Complete definition is cheaper and safer.
The physical obstacles are not merely large but qualitative. At a zebioctet per second, the energy needed to switch the required number of states, even at the thermodynamic minimum, becomes a substantial power; the practical figure for real electronics is many orders of magnitude above that; and the number of parallel channels required exceeds anything that could be built and cooled. These are not engineering targets.
The 18.1 per cent gap from the decimal unit continues the pattern that runs through the whole binary series. Each step multiplies the discrepancy by 1.024, so a convention that was harmless at the kibioctet has become, by this point, a difference no reader could overlook. Making that visible is the purpose the IEC prefixes serve.
In practice, a converter meets this unit only in a complete table or in a document exploring theoretical limits. Handling it correctly costs nothing and demonstrates that the tool applies its rules uniformly, which is the property that makes its ordinary answers trustworthy.
One zebioctet per second equals 1,024 exbioctets per second, 1,180,591,620,717,411,303,424 octets per second, or about 1.181 zettaoctets per second.