| Exbibits per second (Eibit/s) | Exabits per second (Ebit/s) |
|---|---|
| 1 Exbibit per second | 1.15292150461 Ebit/s |
| 2 Exbibits per second | 2.30584300921 Ebit/s |
| 3 Exbibits per second | 3.45876451382 Ebit/s |
| 4 Exbibits per second | 4.61168601843 Ebit/s |
| 5 Exbibits per second | 5.76460752303 Ebit/s |
| 10 Exbibits per second | 11.5292150461 Ebit/s |
| 20 Exbibits per second | 23.0584300921 Ebit/s |
| 25 Exbibits per second | 28.8230376152 Ebit/s |
| 50 Exbibits per second | 57.6460752303 Ebit/s |
| 100 Exbibits per second | 115.292150461 Ebit/s |
| Reference | Exbibits per second (Eibit/s) | Exabits per second (Ebit/s) |
|---|---|---|
| A dial-up modem | 4.85723 × 10-14 Eibit/s | 5.6 × 10-14 Ebit/s |
| Typical home broadband | 8.67362 × 10-11 Eibit/s | 1 × 10-10 Ebit/s |
| Gigabit Ethernet | 8.67362 × 10-10 Eibit/s | 0.000000001 Ebit/s |
| Streaming a 4K film | 2.1684 × 10-11 Eibit/s | 2.5 × 10-11 Ebit/s |
The exbibit per second is a unit of data transfer rate equal to two to the sixtieth power bits per second, which is 1,024 pebibits per second. Its symbol is Eibit/s. It is the binary counterpart of the exabit per second, and the two differ by 15.3 per cent.
That fifteen per cent is more than the margin most engineering work allows anywhere. A quantity stated in the wrong convention at this level is not slightly imprecise but plainly wrong, and no amount of context recovers the intended figure once it has been written ambiguously. This is the situation the IEC prefixes were introduced to prevent.
No physical link approaches this rate. The unit describes aggregates: the total instantaneous traffic of the whole internet is roughly an exabit per second, so a binary exbibit per second is fifteen per cent more than everything moving on every network on the planet at a given moment.
Where a binary figure of this size arises naturally is in address arithmetic rather than in transmission. Two to the sixtieth is a number that appears throughout the design of 64-bit systems, and any rate derived from filling or traversing such an address space in a fixed time is naturally binary. Those calculations are theoretical, but they are the reason the unit is defined rather than left unnamed.
In octets an exbibit per second is 144,115,188,075,855,872, or 128 pebioctets per second. That is more storage moved per second than the world manufactures in several years, which is a way of saying that no source and no destination for such a flow could exist.
For a converter the treatment is mechanical and must be exact. Eibit/s and Ebit/s differ by an eighth, and a tool that treats them as interchangeable has introduced an error larger than the difference between many neighbouring units. The lowercase i is not decoration.
One exbibit per second equals 1,024 pebibits per second, 144,115,188,075,855,872 octets per second, or about 1.153 exabits 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.