The internet is a big and amorphous thing to talk about. What's it made of? Web pages? Articles? Facebook? Stuff you can blow up? How about just how much people actually use it. According to Cisco, we chewed through 30.7 exabytes per month last year. That's the equivalent of about 6 billion 5GB HD movies.


How to Destroy the Internet Remember when Anonymous threatened to destroy the entire internet? We laughed, and ultimately their Read more

The numbers are part of Cisco's annual Visual Networking Index (VNI) report and forecast. If Cisco's predictions pan out, Internet use is going to balloon to 110 exabytes per month in 2016, or 1.3 zettabytes. A zettabyte is a trillion gigabytes.


Other predictions? Video is going to dominate. By 2016, it's gonna be 71 percent of all data used worldwide. Cisco also seems to think 4G won't be quite ubiquitous by 2016—just 36 percent of mobile data by then.

You can check out the data yourself, with an interactive viewing tool, at Cisco's site. [Cisco via GigaOm]