| Exbioctets per second (Eio/s) | Zettabits per second (Zbit/s) |
|---|---|
| 1 Exbioctet per second | 0.00922337203685 Zbit/s |
| 2 Exbioctets per second | 0.0184467440737 Zbit/s |
| 3 Exbioctets per second | 0.0276701161106 Zbit/s |
| 4 Exbioctets per second | 0.0368934881474 Zbit/s |
| 5 Exbioctets per second | 0.0461168601843 Zbit/s |
| 10 Exbioctets per second | 0.0922337203685 Zbit/s |
| 20 Exbioctets per second | 0.184467440737 Zbit/s |
| 25 Exbioctets per second | 0.230584300921 Zbit/s |
| 50 Exbioctets per second | 0.461168601843 Zbit/s |
| 100 Exbioctets per second | 0.922337203685 Zbit/s |
| Reference | Exbioctets per second (Eio/s) | Zettabits per second (Zbit/s) |
|---|---|---|
| A dial-up modem | 6.07153 × 10-15 Eio/s | 5.6 × 10-17 Zbit/s |
| Typical home broadband | 1.0842 × 10-11 Eio/s | 1 × 10-13 Zbit/s |
| Gigabit Ethernet | 1.0842 × 10-10 Eio/s | 1 × 10-12 Zbit/s |
| Streaming a 4K film | 2.71051 × 10-12 Eio/s | 2.5 × 10-14 Zbit/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 zettabit per second is a unit of data transfer rate equal to a thousand exabits per second. Its symbol is Zbit/s. No system on Earth moves data at this rate, and none is planned; the unit exists because the metric system defines every prefix for every unit, whether or not the combination has yet been needed.
To see how far off it is, take the whole internet. Global traffic at present runs at roughly one exabit per second on average, so the entire planet's communications would have to grow a thousandfold to reach one zettabit per second. At the growth rates of the last two decades that would take somewhere between twenty and thirty years, which is precisely the sort of extrapolation that has been wrong in both directions before.
A zettabit per second is 125 exaoctets per second. Since global data storage manufacturing runs at a few hundred exaoctets a year, a link at this rate would transfer the world's entire annual production of new storage capacity in a couple of seconds. Nothing could be stored at the far end; the data would have to be processed and discarded as it arrived.
That last point is not as fanciful as it sounds. Several existing systems already discard almost everything they receive: particle detectors, radio telescope arrays and network monitoring systems all process far more than they keep, because keeping it is impossible and unnecessary. A zettabit-per-second link would be an extreme case of an architecture that already exists.
The physical obstacles are less absolute than they might appear. The theoretical capacity of a single optical fibre is far above what is used today, and the practical limits come from amplifier noise, non-linear effects and the electronics at each end rather than from the glass itself. Aggregating enough fibres would reach a zettabit per second; the difficulty is that nobody has a reason to.
For a converter, the unit matters because forecasts and capacity models are written in whatever unit keeps the numbers legible. A projection that reaches into the 2050s may reasonably state totals in zettabits per second, and a reader needs to be able to convert that into something familiar.
One zettabit per second equals 1,000 exabits per second, 125 exaoctets per second, or about 0.8470 zebibits per second.