IPv6 and the Yottabyte

By David Byrd

By now, most of you know that Wednesday was World IPv6 Day. Altogether, 434 websites, universities, technology companies and service providers shared their content over IPv6. After a collective pause and one-eyed peaking, they learned that IPv6 and IPv4 could indeed share todays Internet. 

The group tested three major elements: pure IPv6 communications, embedded IPv6 inside IPv4, and embedded IPv4 inside IPv6. All of it is necessary because it will take more than a decade to transition from IPv4 to IPv6. In addition to being somewhat of a tongue twister, IPv6 is necessary to increase the number of IP addresses that form the basis for the Internet. As the test went off without a hitch, we can now say, Its all good.” By the way, Broadvox will be testing its IPv6 implementation later this year. Ill keep you informed.

Cisco maintains something called the Visual Networking Index (VNI), an initiative that tracks and forecasts traffic over the Internet. Previously, the VNI noted that the annual global traffic was in the exabyte territory and forecasted that in 2015, it could reach a zettabyte. Now, it is an interesting read the Cisco Visual Networking Index: Forecast and Methodology, 2010-2015.

However, I am more curious about the labels used. In my earlier days of discussing storage, a terabyte was a big number. Only enterprise customers needed to even be aware of the term terabyte”. Incredibly, the VNI forecast for households generating a terabyte of traffic per month in 2015 will be 6 million. Imagine, a domicile with a couple of online professionals, and video viewing, game playing and social media interacting kids will generate enough traffic to equal the biggest number most enterprises evaluated for storage just ten years ago. Given that, how big is big?

Since a gigabyte is pretty common for tech savvy people, lets begin there. A gigabyte is equal to one billion bytes or 10⁹ (1,000,000,000). Following that is a terabyte, petabyte, exabyte, and the rapidly approaching zettabyte or 10²¹ (1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000). (Remember when you would race your siblings or a kid in the neighborhood to see who could count to 100 the fastest?) Anyway, since we were using a z” word for this gargantuan number, I had to see what was next in line. Well, it is a yottabyte made up of a whole lot of yobibits. Who makes up these terms?

Lets conclude with this one known fact: IP communications and applications are generating a whole lot of traffic. And a lotta bytes equals a yottabytes. See you on Monday.

David Byrd is vice president of marketing and sales for

Broadvox
, and is responsible for marketing and channel sales programs to SMBs, enterprises and carriers as well as defining the product offering. Prior to joining Broadvox, David was the vice president of Channels and Alliances for Eftia and Telcordia. As director of eBusiness Development with i2 Technologies, he developed major partnerships with many of the leaders in Internet eCommerce and supply chain management. As CEO of Planet Hollywood Online he was a pioneer in using early Internet technologies to build a branded entertainment and eCommerce website company partnered with Planet Hollywood. Having over 20 years of telecom sales and marketing experience, he has held executive positions with Hewlett-Packard, Sprint and Ericsson.