How big is the Internet? - Results

Fri Aug 16 19:44:21 UTC 2013

Thanks for all the comments.  Through the entire thread on-line and 
off-line only one person contributed an estimate

Patrick Gilmore said:
   All that said: My back-of-the-envelope math says the Internet is order
   of 1 exabyte/day, as defined by my own rules on what counts as "the
   Internet"[*].  I could easily be wrong, but you asked.

   [*] I count Company-to-Company traffic. This is _mostly_ inter-AS
   traffic, but on-net nodes (e.g. Akamai, Google, NF) -> Provider _do_
   count. Things like Google -> Google over Google backbone do not count.
   Things like as701 -> as702 would count, but not as701 -> as701, even if
   the traffic is between two single-homed customers. It is a weird
   definition, but that's how I define it. (Although I may be biased,
   since counting only inter-AS traffic leaves off $SOME_PERCENTAGE of the
   traffic from my company.)

Since there weren't any other estimates to choose between, looks like 
I'll go with Gilmore's number.  Gilmore's estimate was signifcantly lower 
than Cisco's VNI.