What Happens in an Internet Minute?

By Krystal Temple on 13th March 2012

Do you know what happens in one minute on the Internet? In just one minute, more than 204 million emails are sent. Amazon rings up about $83,000 in sales. Around 20 million photos are viewed and 3,000 uploaded on Flickr. At least 6 million Facebook pages are viewed around the world. And more than 61,000 hours of music are played on Pandora while more than 1.3 million video clips are watched on YouTube.

Computing is transforming and touching more people in a wider range of devices. From smartphones to tablets, netbooks and notebooks and even automotive; it can often seem like every one of us is connected. But while it’s hard to miss the proliferation of portable devices, it’s what we don’t see that’s the bigger issue.

What many don’t see is that the increase in mobile devices has had a tremendous impact on the amount of data traffic crossing the network. It’s a little easier to comprehend once we think about all that’s done on a connected device like a smartphone. Listening to music, watching videos, downloading photos, playing online games, refreshing Twitter feeds and status updates – all of those activities generate network traffic. Following is an infographic illustrates just how much data passes through the network in 60 seconds. Nearly 640K Gb of global IP data is transferred in just one Internet minute!



Today, the number of networked devices equals the world’s population. By 2015, the number of networked devices is expected to be double the world’s population. And by the time we reach 2015, it would take five years to view all the video content crossing IP networks each second.

So can our existing networks handle this explosion in network traffic and maintain consumer expectations for immediate access from multiple devices? And if the networks can expand to accommodate this growth, can they do it while maintaining security? Telco equipment manufacturers and service providers will be on the hook to ensure that we continue to enjoy access to information and entertainment on our mobile without any interruption to service.

Intel is working with equipment managers and service providers to help them do just that. Just recently, Intel announced its next-generation communications platform, codenamed “Crystal Forest,” that will boost performance and beef up network security to handle the increasing network traffic. By enabling equipment manufacturers and services providers to deliver platforms that grow along with the network, Intel is also enabling consumers to stay connected on intelligent devices every Internet minute of the day.

Source: Intel

The futurologist Ray Kurzweil once said that 'change is not linear, it is exponential.' Sociologist Alvin Toffler described three waves of evolution in our interaction with tools. The first two, the agricultural and industrial revolutions laid the foundations for the larger, Third Wave - the technology revolution. Prior to the technological wave, life changed relatively slowly, and change was linear, but in the advent of new technologies, we are lurching from change to change without pause. The technological Wave has changed everything in life, including the way we work and trade, learn, provide healthcare, entertain ourselves, conduct our relationships and interact. Arguably, old rubrics which described, but did not govern the pace of technological change (see for example Metcalfe's Law or Moore's Law) may already be outmoded.

The infographic on this page illustrates the sheer volume of user generated content and user activity that occurs every 60 seconds somewhere on the Internet. In one minute there are over 2 million search queries on Google, 6 million Facebook views, over 200 million e-mails sent and 100,000 tweets. These staggering metrics are only the tip of the iceberg. We can expect to see exponential rises in all of these and the emergence of new and more dynamic social media and communication systems. One of the most marked changes are the upsurge in the use of mobile technology, with 1,300 new mobile users every minute. Mobile phones, tablets and laptops are portable gateways into the Internet, and it is predicted by 2015 that there will be twice as many mobile devices on the planet as there are humans. This means that access to the Web will increase, and there will be a steep rise in Internet activity, probably beyond what we can ever imagine. This assumes that the growth rate will continue at its current pace, which of course it won't. It also assumes that people will (and are) using more than one device to access the Internet. I currently have 3 devices with me, and I'm using two of them to write this blog post.

Whichever way we look at this, we know beyond reasonable doubt that demands on the Internet will continue to rise. Are we prepared for this exponential rise in use? The biggest challenge facing us now is not how to use the Internet, but being able to futureproof it so that we have enough bandwidth, capacity and storage space to hold all of the user generated content that is coming. Another challenge is to ensure that the Internet improves in terms of speed, security and usability.

Source: Steve Wheeler

Who will keep the overview about the increasing number of services and the unmanageable amount of virtual time killers?
Don't we need an compact solution of a personal address on the internet like .tel in an advanced version?