A petabyte (derived from the SI prefix peta- ) is a unit of information equal to one quadrillion (short scale) bytes, or 1000 terabytes. The unit symbol for the petabyte is PB. The prefix peta- (P) indicates a power of 1000:
- 1 PB = 1,000,000,000,000,000 B = 10005 B = 1015 B. If you really want to know more check out this Wikipedia article.
We announced today that Mobxiell has reached the milestone of optimizing one petabyte of mobile video traffic every month. One petabyte is one billion megabytes of data, roughly equivalent to 350,000,000 minutes of YouTube videos.
Our milestone was reached thanks to the global growth in mobile video consumption, as well as the company’s recent deployments of its video optimization and web acceleration capabilities in Tier 1 operators in Europe, Latin America and Asia Pacific. Given the current rate of growth, and additional sites being launched, We predict that our existing customer base will reach the five petabyte per month barrier by the end of 2011.
The continued growth of mass market smartphones means that more and more users are creating and accessing video content, placing more and more stress on the operator networks. YouTube is still the biggest source for mobile video consumption, yet the rise of other video-rich websites and mobile applications is also having a big impact. The volume of mobile video traffic is already reaching over 55% of our operator’s HTTP traffic and is continuously growing. Mobile video traffic is predicted to reach more than 70% of all mobile traffic, which means every operator, large and small, should be exploring creative ways to reduce that volume of traffic, as part of a wider traffic optimization strategy in 2011.
We asked Declan Lonergan, vice president of Yankee Group’s Anywhere Consumer research group what he thought of this phenomenon: “The growth of mobile video has outpaced every other form of mobile data on the operator network. It is such a large, and growing source of bandwidth usage, that failing to address it can have a significant, negative impact on a carrier’s operating expenditure, potentially going so far as to put the economics of running a network at risk.”
