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Internet traffic to reach 10 sextillion bytes next year

• August 19, 2026
• Ed Gresser

FACT: Internet traffic to reach 10 sextillion bytes next year.

THE NUMBERS: Information content of seven communications forms –

WHAT THEY MEAN: 

How much information moves around the world? And how does it travel?

Vocabulary first: Internet-watchers count information flow in “bytes,” a term invented by IBM’s Werner Buchholz in 1961. One byte is the amount of information necessary to portray a single character on a computer screen. Each byte in turn is made of eight “bits”, referring to the “binary digits” — 1 or 0 — used in computer code. The eight-bit rule isn’t required by math or physics; Buchholz and his associates just thought the 256 possible eight-bit strings, from 00000000 to 11111111, would be enough to represent all the necessary letters, numerals, mathematical notations, currency signs, and other keyboard characters.

Following Buchholz’s lead, experts at the International Bureau of Weights and Measures have fended off an uncontrolled proliferation of zeros and commas by inventing new words every decade or so. “Petabyte” and “exabyte,” referring to quadrillions and quintillions of bytes, date to 1982. “Zettabyte,” meaning a sextillion bytes, debuted in 1991 — three years before the World Wide Web went live — and is now the one-digit way to record Internet data traffic.

Data traffic: The International Telecommunications Union’s estimates of annual data flow — all the information moving around the world, across borders and within countries — from last year to the launch of the Internet:

The jump from 0.000002 zettabytes in 1990 to 7.94 zettabytes in 2025 represents a 40 million-fold increase in information flow — voice calls, videos, Zoom sessions, movie downloads, gaming, texting, etc. — from the first website posting in 1989 to the present, mirrored by a fall in the cost of moving it around.

How did this happen? Mainly by stringing a few hundred wires under the oceans.

Cables: The commonly used stat — submarine fiber-optic cables carry about 95%, or possibly 99% — of all data traffic seems slightly squishy. NOAA is confident about it, but Telegeography traces its last verification to a 2015 FCC report, and at least 10,000 satellites have launched since then. But experts are at least confident that while the decade’s satellite deployment filled in lots of Internet dead spots — deserts, remote rural areas, ships at sea, planes in the air — cables still carry the vast majority of the bytes. Here’s their evolution:

1956: The first transatlantic telephone cable — a copper wire named “TAT-1” — went live two months after Buchholz’s “byte” coinage. (Earlier cables dated back to 1858, but transmitted telegraph and Morse code only.) In modern terms, TAT-1 could handle 2.3 megabits of data per second, or about 300,000 bytes. In human terms, that meant a maximum of 36 simultaneous voice calls. The cable owners, a U.S./British/Canadian consortium, charged $12 for a three-minute call. Median income that year was $2,432, or $6.70 per day, so a short U.S.-U.K. call would have cost a typical person nearly two days’ pay.

1988: A generation later, the first fiber-optic submarine cable (TAT-8) had a capacity of 560 megabits per second — 100 times its copper ancestor — and could manage 40,000 simultaneous voice calls. This one had 29 joint U.S., British, Canadian, and European owners. They charged $1.00 per minute at off-peak times, and $2 at peak.

2000: At the millennium, TeleGeography’s second annual Submarine Cable Map recorded 100 active fiber-optic cables, with the four-cornered U.S.-to-Japan “Pacific Crossing,” able to move 640 gigabits of data per second, the top performer. Though voice calls were no longer the glamor product, Pacific Crossing could theoretically have managed 10 million voice calls. Transatlantic calls cost about 10 cents per minute.

2010: Unity Submarine, also a Japan-to-U.S. cable, had a 7.7 terabyte capacity — another tenfold jump, equivalent to 175 million phone conversations. In that glum financial-crisis year, Telegraphy counted 406 operating fiber-optic cables. The FCC gave up on tracking international phone costs, since so many were free with Internet service.

2026: There are now 694 cables. Anjana, a Spain-to-South Carolina wire supposed to go live this fall, can carry 480 terabits of information per second. This is equivalent to 7.5 billion simultaneous conversations, easily enough to accommodate all the people in the world, if all they wanted to talk at the same time. Average Internet access cost in the U.S. (allowing, more or less, all the calls you want, no matter how long) is about $80 per month or $2.65 per day. For someone earning the U.S.’ median income of $65,050 per year, or $178 per day, that would be about seven minutes’ worth of income.

Two thoughts:

Physical: A 10,000-kilometer trans-Pacific giant with a top-of-the-line 24 fiber pairs typically is about an inch in diameter, weighs about 100,000 tons, and costs a bit above $500 million. A short one, for example one crossing the English Channel to connect London and Paris, would weigh about 80 tons and cost around $50 million.

Content: As the byte-content of emails, voice calls, and videos suggests, the information flowing over cables and down satellite beams is mainly video. Per Satellite Today, YouTube videos take up 13% of fiber-optic cable traffic, Netflix shows 10%, Facebook messaging 6%, TikTok videos 4%, and everything else 67%.

FURTHER READING

Cables & data flow:

Telegeography’s Submarine Cable Map.

And the ITU’s estimates of Internet data traffic.

Policy:

Trade: The Bureau of Economic Analysis reports that in 2025, American exports of information and communications services, plus “digitally deliverable services” such as entertainment, news, telemedicine, architectural plans, and so on, came to $959 billion — a bit less than half of the $2.2 trillion in goods exports, and 3% of U.S. GDP.

Policy and its growth impact: Last year’s OECD/WTO review of digital data flows, their growth effects, and the impact of regulation concludes that the best approach (at least from a GDP growth point of view) is “free flow of data combined with clear regulatory policies.” A hypothetical zero-regulation approach — no privacy rules, no content moderation, etc. — forfeits trust and leads to a loss of 0.9% of world GDP, while an open Internet with generally agreed-upon regulatory principles adds 1.8%. “Geoeconomic fragmentation,” like zero-reg, costs 0.9% of world GDP; “data autarky,” an extreme version of geoeconomics, yields a financial-crisis-style loss of 4.5%.

People:

Also from the International Telecommunications Union, a count of Internet users over time:

Words:

The International Bureau of Weights and Measures is responsible for order-of-magnitude prefixes, and has already prepared for the next round. After “zettabytes” come “yottabytes.” The next two, coined in 2022 and available whenever needed, are “ronnabyte” for 1 octillion bytes and “quettabyte” for a nonillion bytes. Both date to 2022. The prefixes apply universally — tons, meters, liters, etc. The mass of the Earth, for example, is 6 zettatons, and that of the solar system two ronnatons. The Milky Way, whose mass is about a trillion times the solar system’s, will have to wait for three more prefixes.

The Poughkeepsie Journal’s 2019 obit of the unassuming Mr. Buchholz — a Holocaust survivor, pioneer of transistor-based computing, and “byte” inventor.

ABOUT ED

Ed Gresser is Vice President and Director for Trade and Global Markets at PPI.

Ed returns to PPI after working for the think tank from 2001-2011. He most recently served as the Assistant U.S. Trade Representative for Trade Policy and Economics at the Office of the United States Trade Representative (USTR). In this position, he led USTR’s economic research unit from 2015-2021, and chaired the 21-agency Trade Policy Staff Committee.

Ed began his career on Capitol Hill before serving USTR as Policy Advisor to USTR Charlene Barshefsky from 1998 to 2001. He then led PPI’s Trade and Global Markets Project from 2001 to 2011. After PPI, he co-founded and directed the independent think tank ProgressiveEconomy until rejoining USTR in 2015. In 2013, the Washington International Trade Association presented him with its Lighthouse Award, awarded annually to an individual or group for significant contributions to trade policy.

Ed is the author of Freedom from Want: American Liberalism and the Global Economy (2007). He has published in a variety of journals and newspapers, and his research has been cited by leading academics and international organizations including the WTO, World Bank, and International Monetary Fund. He is a graduate of Stanford University and holds a Master’s Degree in International Affairs from Columbia Universities and a certificate from the Averell Harriman Institute for Advanced Study of the Soviet Union.

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