| Petabits per second (Pbit/s) | Exbioctets per second (Eio/s) |
|---|---|
| 1 Petabit per second | 0.000108420217249 Eio/s |
| 2 Petabits per second | 0.000216840434497 Eio/s |
| 3 Petabits per second | 0.000325260651746 Eio/s |
| 4 Petabits per second | 0.000433680868994 Eio/s |
| 5 Petabits per second | 0.000542101086243 Eio/s |
| 10 Petabits per second | 0.00108420217249 Eio/s |
| 20 Petabits per second | 0.00216840434497 Eio/s |
| 25 Petabits per second | 0.00271050543121 Eio/s |
| 50 Petabits per second | 0.00542101086243 Eio/s |
| 100 Petabits per second | 0.0108420217249 Eio/s |
| Reference | Petabits per second (Pbit/s) | Exbioctets per second (Eio/s) |
|---|---|---|
| A dial-up modem | 5.6 × 10-11 Pbit/s | 6.07153 × 10-15 Eio/s |
| Typical home broadband | 0.0000001 Pbit/s | 1.0842 × 10-11 Eio/s |
| Gigabit Ethernet | 0.000001 Pbit/s | 1.0842 × 10-10 Eio/s |
| Streaming a 4K film | 0.000000025 Pbit/s | 2.71051 × 10-12 Eio/s |
The petabit per second is a unit of data transfer rate equal to a thousand terabits per second. Its symbol is Pbit/s. It marks the frontier of optical transmission research: the rate at which laboratories have carried data down a single strand of glass, and which no deployed system yet approaches.
The records were set by combining three techniques. Multi-core fibre puts several separate light-guiding paths inside one cladding, so that a single strand behaves like a bundle. Wavelength division multiplexing runs hundreds of distinct colours down each of those cores. Advanced modulation encodes many bits into each pulse. Multiplying the three together is what reaches a petabit per second.
Such demonstrations run over tens of kilometres of fibre in controlled conditions, not the thousands of kilometres a working sea cable must span. Distance is the hard part: signals attenuate, dispersion smears pulses together, and non-linear effects in the glass grow with power. Every kilometre added makes the same rate harder to sustain, which is why deployed cables sit two orders of magnitude below the laboratory record.
In octets a petabit per second is 125 teraoctets per second, which is roughly the storage of a hundred and twenty-five large hard drives moved every second. Nothing at either end of such a link could produce or absorb data at that rate; the figure describes the medium's capacity rather than any use of it.
At the network level the unit is used for aggregates. The total interconnect capacity of a very large data centre, the summed capacity of all the cables landing on a continent, and the peak traffic of the largest content networks are quoted in petabits per second. These are sums over thousands of links, not the rating of any one.
The trajectory is worth noting. Transoceanic capacity has grown by roughly a factor of ten every seven or eight years for several decades, driven almost entirely by better electronics and better coding rather than by more glass. If that continues, the petabit per second will describe a working cable within a generation.
One petabit per second equals 1,000 terabits per second, 125 teraoctets per second, or about 0.8882 pebibits per second.
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.