A connectivity milestone: 200 Tb/s

Every second, vast amounts of data flow into and out of our global IP backbone as networks, content providers, and enterprises exchange traffic across the public Internet. This real-time, bidirectional flow is measured in terabits per second (Tb/s).

At the edge of our backbone, traffic recently reached 200 Tb/s. To put this into perspective, 200 Tb/s is roughly 200,000 times faster than a 1-gigabit home fiber connection. That’s approximately the capacity for 40 million simultaneous 1080p Netflix streams, equivalent to nearly the entire population of Canada watching at once.

It took 30 years (from 1993 to 2023) to reach 100 Tb/s of traffic, but only another two and a half years to reach 200 Tb/s today. This exponential growth proves that the public Internet remains the backbone of the global economy.

We’ve been here from the Internet’s early stages and have watched it develop through the years. Since the ‘90s, we’ve built, operated, and maintained network infrastructure that has proven essential for scaling multinational enterprises. This longevity reflects our focus on operational stewardship in concert with other Tier-1 service providers to ensure reliability, neutrality, and scalable interconnection.

Let’s explore the internet’s development to fully contextualize this milestone.

A front-row seat since the early ‘90s

Like many innovations, even the Internet had early doubters. A Newsweek article by Clifford Stoll, titled, “The Internet? Bah!,” claimed, “No online database will replace your daily newspaper, no CD-ROM can take the place of a competent teacher and no computer network will change the way government works.”

As time would tell, these predictions didn’t exactly pan out. Total internet traffic in 1984 was 15 gigabytes per month. By 2015, the average internet user generated 15 gigabytes of traffic per month individually. Now it’s even higher, but we still have the reliable network needed to support it.

We’ve witnessed tremendous transformations since the Internet’s infancy. The world evolved from dialup (with all its notorious cacophony) in the early 1990s to broadband in the early 2000s, then to mobile connectivity and fiber optics throughout the 2010s into today. We’ve seen connectivity infrastructure scale from dialup’s circuit-switched PSTN voice networks to today’s massive DWDM fiber builds, linking terrestrial and subsea networks across thousands of kilometers.

Growth drivers and looking ahead

These extraordinary developments are impressive, yet the Internet’s growth drivers are only accelerating. Companies require more and more bandwidth to support streaming platforms, online gaming, video applications, and other content.

Another thing to keep in mind: this growth is with minimal AI traffic across our backbone so far. We’ll likely reach the next milestone even sooner, particularly as a growing ecosystem of AI service providers (or “neoscalers”) depend on high-capacity connectivity to deliver AI capabilities at scale. We’re investing in our infrastructure every day to support these needs and maintain our standing as the operator of the #1 ranked global internet backbone since 2017.

Our geographical network reaches 95% of North American and European end users within a single hop, ensuring high-speed internet connectivity up to 400 Gb/s. It spans over 77,000 kilometers and serves customers in 129 countries, connecting to over 350 Points-of-Presence (PoPs) worldwide.

We’ve expanded our network organically for over 30 years, enabling us to avoid the service complexities of alternative, patchwork networks pieced together through decades of company mergers and acquisitions.

Ensuring predictability in an unpredictable world

We owe this achievement to our current teams as well as the technical experts and engineers who came before us. The sheer scale of traffic traversing our network is humbling. But it also motivates us to continue building our network for tomorrow’s challenges.

From societally traumatic events like the global pandemic, to cataclysmic natural disasters, to AI’s massive capacity requirements, our backbone provides reliable, scalable connectivity to support the world’s largest enterprises, no matter what challenges we face next.

As we always say, you can’t predict the future, but you can be ready.

Mattias Fridström, Chief Evangelist