How the internet will become the ‘exanet’
Today’s internet has transformed media and delivered prodigious value to consumers in entertainment, ecommerce, and personal productivity.
Yet the next waves of the internet will extend to new industries in the physical world, delivering a far greater variety of services and requiring connectivity that is even faster, more ubiquitous, and more robust than today. To drive and accommodate this embrace of information by the real economy, we’ll need something bigger and better than the internet. We’ll need the “exanet.”
In 2016, global internet traffic likely topped 1,000 exabytes. A thousand exabytes equals one zettabyte (ZB), or a billion trillion (1021) bytes, which is roughly 114 million years of high-definition video. Over the last 20 years, since the dawn of the dot-com era in 1996, monthly internet traffic has grown around 90 million-fold.
This onrushing of data is largely due to web video, which took off just a dozen years ago, first with YouTube, then Netflix, and now with Facebook, Snapchat, HBO, FaceTime, sports leagues, and endless others. At the same time, mobile devices supercharged video consumption because they allowed billions of people to watch anytime, anywhere, not just after dinner on the couch. YouTube reported yesterday that its viewers now watch more than one billion hours of video a day, and more than 400 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube each minute.
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