What's a zettabyte? By 2015, the internet will know, says Cisco

Courtesy of Cisco, a skyscraper infographic about the dawning of the age of the zettabyte.

The what? Each zettabyte is 1,000 exabytes. No? One exabyte = 1,000 petabytes. One petabyte = 1,000 terabytes. One terabyte (you may be starting to feel the ocean floor now) is 1,000 gigabytes. See, you can find your way to the shore now.

Cisco sees the movement towards the exabyte as an inevitable endpoint of the growth in video traffic online. Its analysis suggests that we'll have shifted into the zettabyte age by 2015: by then, it reckons,

the majority of global Internet traffic (61 percent) will be in some form of video—Internet video-to-PC, Internet video-to-TV, mobile video, et al.The "dawn of the Zettabyte era" will be an unprecedented online milestone that will occur in our lifetime.

Part of the problem of course is that it's almost impossible to wrap your head around the physical or temporal ramifications of these numbers. For example, from the Cisco blogpost: "A zettabyte is roughly 1000 exabytes. To place that amount of volume in more practical terms, an exabyte alone has the capacity to hold over 36,000 years worth of HD quality video…or stream the entire Netflix catalog more than 3,000 times. A zettabyte is equivalent to about 250 billion DVDs."

Oh, that's much easier - got it now.

This image shows how Cisco expects traffic to change over the next four years. Note how the US is the biggest user, but China is accelerating too. (You can play with the graphics yourself on the Cisco website.)

Cisco forecast for data traffic growth, 2010-2015, by region/country

Of course - to put some perspective on it - at that point some of us may still be struggling with 2 megabit/s connections. The zettabyte era might pass us by. But here is what it looks like, from Cisco's point of view.

Zettabyte comprehension: the infographic by Cisco