- An exabyte follows the same rule as a byte where it represents a word length. An exabyte is a quintillion--or 1 billion billion--bytes of information. When using exponents, an exabyte is 2 to the 60th power or 10 to the 18th power. When writing the approximate number of an exabyte as a whole number it would be the number 1 with 18 zeros, or 1,000,000,000,000,000,000.
- Gordon Moore, Intel's co-founder, studied integrated circuit improvements in capacity (increase in transistors), speed and performance. Moore's law can be applied to the increase in Internet speed and the amount of information people add to the Internet each day. The content can be text, graphics or video. When the content increases, storage space has to be added. So the volume is increasing from terabytes to exabytes. As Internet usage expands, exabytes will be used as a unit of measurement for Internet storage.
- In 2007, the amount of digital information created and downloaded was 161 exabytes. By 2011, Internet traffic is expected to grow to approximately 29 exabytes per month, largely due to consumer usage and video content.
- People use digital versatile disks to watch movies or backup information from a computer. An exabyte is equivalent to 250 million DVDs. Approximately 1,000 petabytes is equal to an exabyte. To put that into perspective, consider that you would need 20 petabytes to back up the Library of Congress' content of 126 million items to digital format--980 petabytes short of one exabyte. Also, according to a 2002 study, conversations worldwide from telephone land lines and cellular phones amounted to 17.3 exabytes of new information.
- Optical Carrier 192 (or OC-192) represents Internet bandwidth. As of 2009, the current Internet bandwidth is OC-48. In order for Internet carriers to handle exabytes of data, the Internet backbone has to be upgraded to OC-192. AT&T has upgraded its Internet bandwidth to improve its cellular, Internet and television services.
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