How big is the Internet? - Results

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1

Thanks for all the comments. Through the entire thread on-line and off-line only one person contributed an estimate

Patrick Gilmore said:
   All that said: My back-of-the-envelope math says the Internet is order
   of 1 exabyte/day, as defined by my own rules on what counts as "the
   Internet"[*]. I could easily be wrong, but you asked.

   [*] I count Company-to-Company traffic. This is _mostly_ inter-AS
   traffic, but on-net nodes (e.g. Akamai, Google, NF) -> Provider _do_
   count. Things like Google -> Google over Google backbone do not count.
   Things like as701 -> as702 would count, but not as701 -> as701, even if
   the traffic is between two single-homed customers. It is a weird
   definition, but that's how I define it. (Although I may be biased,
   since counting only inter-AS traffic leaves off $SOME_PERCENTAGE of the
   traffic from my company.)

Since there weren't any other estimates to choose between, looks like I'll go with Gilmore's number. Gilmore's estimate was signifcantly lower than Cisco's VNI.

2

Perhaps the answers would have made more sense if everyone knew exactly what the question was. :slight_smile:

You asked for an estimate of the "size of the Internet", but didn't specify if you meant number of networks comprising the Internet, number of devices connected to the Internet, combined total transit for all ASNs connected to the Internet, etc. The nature of the Internet is that nobody knows the answers to any of these questions. How do you know what goes on in my networks? So any "answers" are really only wild guesses.