The growth in the number of broadband users and mobile Internet subscribers along with increased file sizes has been pushing the amount of data on the Internet for past few years. Today, one company which has a network that is spread across the world gave us a clue as to how much.
Akamai, a Cambridge, Mass.-based content delivery network today said that at peak it was sending 3.45 terabits per second of data on Friday. This is the highest amount of data they have sent over the Akamai network ever. The traffic peak of 3.45 Tbps is roughly equivalent to the capacity needed to download the entire printed contents of the U.S. Library of Congress in less than a minute.
That is not all. Akamai network hit a brand new peak for video streaming on Friday — thanks in large part to a big surge in demand for professional golf and baseball video streams. Over the course of the day, Akamai logged over 500 billion requests for content, a sum equal to serving content to every human once every 20 minutes.
At peak, Akamai supported over 12 million requests per second – a rate roughly equivalent to serving content to the entire population of the United States every 30 seconds, the company said.
“This new peak demand demonstrates the Internet’s emergence as a primary channel for communications, entertainment, and commerce,” Paul Sagan, Akamai’s President and CEO said in a statement.
