Megabit to Exabyte

Divide Mbps by 8 to get megabytes per second (MB/s). A 100 Mbps connection = 12.5 MB/s. A 1 Gbps connection = 125 MB/s. This conversion is essential when comparing advertised internet speeds (always in Mbps) to actual file download speeds (shown in MB/s by browsers and download managers).

Netflix recommends 25 Mbps for 4K Ultra HD. Disney+ and Apple TV+ recommend 25 Mbps; YouTube recommends 20 Mbps for 4K. These are per-stream figures — a household streaming two 4K sources simultaneously needs roughly 50 Mbps of reliable throughput, plus headroom for other devices.

ISP speed ratings are theoretical maximums under ideal conditions. Real-world factors include network congestion, router quality, Wi-Fi interference, the server's upload speed, and protocol overhead. Additionally, browsers and download managers report speeds in MB/s (bytes), which is 8× smaller than the Mbps figure — a 100 Mbps plan showing 11 MB/s in a browser is performing normally.

One gigabit equals 1,000 megabits (SI decimal system). Gigabit broadband (1 Gbps) = 1,000 Mbps = 125 MB/s theoretical download speed. In the binary IEC system, one gibibit = 1,024 mebibits — but for internet speeds the SI decimal values are always used.

Fiber-to-the-home (FTTH) delivers symmetric speeds of 100–10,000 Mbps with consistent performance regardless of distance from the exchange. Cable (DOCSIS 3.1) offers 100–1,200 Mbps download but typically 10–50 Mbps upload, and throughput degrades during neighborhood peak hours due to shared bandwidth. DSL (VDSL2) maxes out at 50–100 Mbps download and drops sharply beyond 500 meters from the DSLAM cabinet. In practice, most cable users see 60–80% of advertised speeds; DSL users at distance may see under 50%. Fiber is the only technology that reliably delivers its rated megabit throughput.

One exabyte = 1,000,000 terabytes = 1,000 petabytes. If you filled 1 TB external hard drives and stacked them end to end, 1 EB worth would stretch roughly 200 km. In content terms: 1 EB can store about 250,000 years of HD video, or about 100 billion hours of music at 128 kbps. All the data produced by the Large Hadron Collider per year is about 15 petabytes — still 67× less than one exabyte.

Global data creation, capture, copy, and consumption is estimated at roughly 2.5 exabytes per day (IDC 2023 estimate), growing roughly 23% annually. This includes IoT sensor readings, financial transactions, social media posts, surveillance camera footage, scientific instrument output, and all other digital activity. Most of this data is transient and never stored long-term.

Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud each store estimated tens to hundreds of exabytes of customer data in their cloud platforms. Meta (Facebook/Instagram) stores an estimated 100+ exabytes across all data types. The NSA's Utah Data Center is estimated to hold yottabytes in capability, though actual stored volumes are classified. Collectively, global cloud storage is in the hundreds-of-exabytes range.

An exabyte (EB) = 10¹⁸ bytes (SI decimal). An exbibyte (EiB) = 2⁶⁰ bytes = 1,152,921,504,606,846,976 bytes — about 15.3% larger. This is the largest practically relevant gap between SI and IEC units in storage contexts. For a data center procuring 10 EB of storage, the SI vs IEC difference represents about 1.5 EB of capacity discrepancy in the contract.

Data archaeology is the practice of recovering information from obsolete storage media and formats — 9-track magnetic tapes, 8-inch floppy disks, MiniDiscs, Zip drives, and early optical formats. The challenge is threefold: hardware to read the media no longer exists or is failing, file formats and encoding schemes are undocumented, and magnetic media degrade over time (tape has a 10–30 year shelf life). At exabyte scale, organisations like national archives face the prospect of vast digital collections becoming unreadable within decades. Active migration strategies — periodically copying data to current formats and media — are the only reliable defense, but the cost scales linearly with data volume.