Global internet traffic will pass one zettabyte for the first time this year, after increasing fivefold in the last five years.

Cisco, the networking company that supplies much of the world’s internet infrastructure, says that the total amount of traffic will reach around 1,060 exabytes, or just over one zettabyte.

That’s a lot: one billion terabytes, or one trillion gigabytes or 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000000 bytes. Or 667 trillion films, or 152 million years of high-definition video (based on a two-hour, 1.5GB film).

Cisco is predicting that internet traffic will double again by 2019, with much of the growth driven by huge increases in mobile data use. Mobile data will grow at an average rate of 57 per cent a year, although most internet traffic will continue to be made up of fixed broadband.