We're Running out of Bandwith!!

Every day we all hear about the human race (America especially) using too much energy and how we should cut it down.  The well known culprits for this problem are transportation, heating, lights, etc. Some researchers from Bristol University in the UK have proven that something that most of us cannot go a couple hours without is a major power consumer. Data. Whether it be watching a YouTube video on your computer or phone, watching your favorite show that you missed last night or reading your favorite blog, Gizmo-teched, you probably use a lot of data through the day.

The researchers decided that by 2030 all sources of media will be stored in the cloud, which means even television will be streamed from a server somewhere just like the internet is now. If the amount of data usage (including TV) stays the same as it is right now, by 2030 each person will be using about 3 gigabytes of data per day which amounts to 2,570 exabytes of data per year for the global population. I think this number is so vast that we have nothing to compare it with so let me break it down for you and make some comparisons to more familiar things. One megabyte is, nowadays, a pretty small measure of data. 100 megabytes might hold a couple volumes of Encyclopedias. 600 megabytes is about the amount of data that will fit on a CD-ROM disk. The next unit is the gigabyte which is about 1000 megabytes. 1 Gigabyte could hold the contents of about 10 yards of books on a shelf. 100 Gigabytes could hold the entire library floor of academic journals. The next unit is terabyte which is about 1000 gigabytes. One terabyte can hold about 300 hours of good quality video or hold 1,000 copies of the Encyclopedia Britannica. Ten Terabytes could hold the printed collection of the Library of Congress. The next unit is petabyte which is about 1000 terabytes. This is the point where the volumes of data become hard to comprehend as we really have nothing to compare it to but one example is a petabyte can hold about 13 years worth of HD video and 50 petabytes could hold the entire written works of mankind in EVERY LANGUAGE! Finally we come to exabytes which..you guessed it, is about 1000 petabytes or a billion gigabytes. Now there really isn’t anything to compare to but it’s said that 5 exabytes would be equal to every word ever said by the human race.....let me let that sink in....wow.

Now back to the problem at hand. Think about how much energy it would take to move around all that data. The researchers estimate it will take about 1,175 gigawatts of electricity to do this. To put this into perspective, New York City, aka. “The city that never sleeps” uses about 22.5 gigawatts of electricity (or 1/50th of the amount of electricity NYC) per day…again, let me let that sink in……!!!  It takes a large coal power plant to produce just one gigawatt of energy, so imagine 1,175 of those on top of all the other plants needed for other things such as lights, heating water, and other electronics.

This realization has brought upon the “green IT” movement and there are some people who have presented ideas at the “IEEE CloudCom 2010” convention trying to push greener thinking when it comes to data usage. For example, one way to cut down data usage is for website makers not to use high resolution images when a low or medium resolution image would be enough. There is still a lot of research and data needed in this topic for it to become more public but in our present “information age”, this is bound to become a very big problem in the very near future.