| Exbioctets per second (Eio/s) | Exabits per second (Ebit/s) |
|---|---|
| 1 Exbioctet per second | 9.22337203685 Ebit/s |
| 2 Exbioctets per second | 18.4467440737 Ebit/s |
| 3 Exbioctets per second | 27.6701161106 Ebit/s |
| 4 Exbioctets per second | 36.8934881474 Ebit/s |
| 5 Exbioctets per second | 46.1168601843 Ebit/s |
| 10 Exbioctets per second | 92.2337203685 Ebit/s |
| 20 Exbioctets per second | 184.467440737 Ebit/s |
| 25 Exbioctets per second | 230.584300921 Ebit/s |
| 50 Exbioctets per second | 461.168601843 Ebit/s |
| 100 Exbioctets per second | 922.337203685 Ebit/s |
| Reference | Exbioctets per second (Eio/s) | Exabits per second (Ebit/s) |
|---|---|---|
| A dial-up modem | 6.07153 × 10-15 Eio/s | 5.6 × 10-14 Ebit/s |
| Typical home broadband | 1.0842 × 10-11 Eio/s | 1 × 10-10 Ebit/s |
| Gigabit Ethernet | 1.0842 × 10-10 Eio/s | 0.000000001 Ebit/s |
| Streaming a 4K film | 2.71051 × 10-12 Eio/s | 2.5 × 10-11 Ebit/s |
The exbioctet per second is a unit of data transfer rate equal to 1,024 pebioctets per second, or two to the sixtieth power octets per second. Its symbol is Eio/s. It is the binary counterpart of the exaoctet per second, and the two differ by 15.3 per cent.
No machine, network or aggregate reaches this rate. An exbioctet per second is more than eight times the total instantaneous traffic of the entire internet, and it would move the world's whole stock of stored data in a matter of minutes. The unit describes a capacity with no source that could supply it and no destination that could take it in.
Two to the sixtieth is nevertheless a familiar number in computing, because it is the size of the address space a 64-bit machine can reach in octets divided by sixteen. The same power of two turns up in filesystem limits, in memory maps and in the design of every system built on that architecture, so the quantity is well known even though no rate approaches it.
The unit exists because the IEC series was defined completely. Every binary prefix pairs with every unit, exactly as every metric prefix does, so that a reader who has never seen Eio/s can decode it from the prefix alone. A system with gaps would need a table of permitted combinations, which is precisely what a rule-based system exists to avoid.
The difference from the decimal unit is worth restating at each level because it compounds. At the kibioctet it was 2.4 per cent, here it is more than an eighth, and at the yobioctet it will be more than a fifth. That growth is the reason the binary prefixes were created, and it is why the lowercase i has to be written even in figures nobody will check.
For a converter, the treatment is mechanical: six multiplications by 1,024 from octets, or the equivalent divisions coming down. The value of doing it correctly is not that anyone will use the result, but that a tool which handles every case the same way can be trusted on the cases that matter.
One exbioctet per second equals 1,024 pebioctets per second, 1,152,921,504,606,846,976 octets per second, or about 1.153 exaoctets 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.