| Exaoctets per second (Eo/s) | Exabits per second (Ebit/s) |
|---|---|
| 1 Exaoctet per second | 8 Ebit/s |
| 2 Exaoctets per second | 16 Ebit/s |
| 3 Exaoctets per second | 24 Ebit/s |
| 4 Exaoctets per second | 32 Ebit/s |
| 5 Exaoctets per second | 40 Ebit/s |
| 10 Exaoctets per second | 80 Ebit/s |
| 20 Exaoctets per second | 160 Ebit/s |
| 25 Exaoctets per second | 200 Ebit/s |
| 50 Exaoctets per second | 400 Ebit/s |
| 100 Exaoctets per second | 800 Ebit/s |
| Reference | Exaoctets per second (Eo/s) | Exabits per second (Ebit/s) |
|---|---|---|
| A dial-up modem | 7 × 10-15 Eo/s | 5.6 × 10-14 Ebit/s |
| Typical home broadband | 1.25 × 10-11 Eo/s | 1 × 10-10 Ebit/s |
| Gigabit Ethernet | 1.25 × 10-10 Eo/s | 0.000000001 Ebit/s |
| Streaming a 4K film | 3.125 × 10-12 Eo/s | 2.5 × 10-11 Ebit/s |
The exaoctet per second is a unit of data transfer rate equal to a thousand petaoctets per second, or eight exabits per second. Its symbol is Eo/s. Nothing built runs at this rate: it is about eight times the total traffic of the entire internet, counted across every network on the planet at once.
The unit is useful mainly for thought experiments about limits. If every hard drive and flash chip manufactured in a year were read simultaneously at full speed, the combined rate would be in this range. So would the total output of every camera sensor in every phone on Earth if they all recorded at once. These are sums over the whole world's hardware, not rates any system experiences.
There is one situation in which very large data volumes really do move faster than any network, and it puts the unit in perspective. Physically shipping a container of hard drives across an ocean transfers more data per second, averaged over the journey, than any cable. A shipping container holding a few exaoctets crossing the Atlantic in a week works out to several gigaoctets per second, and a truck of drives driven across a city beats almost any local link.
That calculation is not a joke; cloud providers offer it as a service. When a customer needs to move petaoctets into a data centre, the provider ships a lorry full of storage rather than attempting the transfer over a network, because the network would take months. The bandwidth of a vehicle is enormous, though its latency is measured in days.
For the unit itself, an exaoctet per second is 125 petaoctets per second, and it would transfer the world's entire stock of stored data — a few hundred zettaoctets — in about a week of continuous running. No mechanism exists to feed such a link, and none is being designed.
A converter must nevertheless handle the unit, because it appears in aggregate capacity models, in academic papers on the theoretical limits of communication, and in any table that lists the metric prefixes completely. A quantity does not need a use for its name to be well formed.
One exaoctet per second equals 1,000 petaoctets per second, 8 exabits per second, or about 0.8674 exbioctets per second.
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.