GSB Technology: What Happens in an Internet Minute?

What's an "internet minute?" It's an aggregate of all the data flowing over the internet over a given minute. The numbers are staggering, and growing daily. I won't get into data numbers; most eyes tend to glaze over quickly, and of course the information is readily available to interested people on the internet. Where else, right?
To most of us, it is the trends and changes that command our attention. For instance, more internet traffic now flows over mobile devices than over traditional computers. Not sure who would have predicted that ten years ago.

By early 2014, mobile devices accounted for more than 50% of internet traffic. (a)

Of course predicting where technology is heading is tricky business at best. At the dawn of the internet age, Netscape, Alta Vista and AOL completely dominated the newly emerging home page business, aggregating links, information and a browser. Only AOL has survived, but only barely. Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome and Safari now are our browsers of choice and the Google search engine is the home page of choice. But don't for an instance think that they are permanent fixtures. Inevitably, time will bring change.
A fine example of changes in internet use over time is found in a Cisco-created infographic, "What Happens in an Internet Minute?" The graphic was first created in 2012 and revisited in 2014.
In 2012, YouTube, Google, Facebook, Twitter and Flickr were the top five sites in terms of internet usage. A short two years later, Netflix is the number one site producing internet traffic. Yes, Netflix streams video and thereby use quite a bit of bandwidth relative to a site like Flickr, but even accounting for video's bandwidth requirements, Netflix has to be seen as one of the real internet success stories of the last few years. It's simply amazing how much traffic moves through their site. Perhaps even more surprisingly, Netflix and YouTube account for over half of all internet traffic.
   Earlier, I mentioned that mobile devices were now carrying more than half of all internet traffic. One predictable change that follows the trend towards mobile computing concerns applications. In 2012, there were 47,000 app downloads in an internet minute. By 2014, that number had climbed to 194,064. Likely, as I write this well into 2015, there are over 200,000 apps downloaded in an internet minute worldwide.
   Another interesting fact is found in the 2014 infographic in the And Future Growth is Staggering section. Here, it is mentioned that in 2017, there will be three times more connected devices than people on Earth. This alludes to the "internet of things." You may have heard this phrase associated with the next big wave of internet usage. Smart appliances, cars that can connect to emergency services and industrial machinery that is wirelessly connected to remote sensors all are part of the internet of things. It's a trend that is growing in visible and invisible ways, and its growth seems without limit right now.
   Want to take a good, close look at these infographics? Right click on an image below and choose the prompt "save as." Then save the file to your computer. Now, you can open it up as a separate file and even expand the image for a closer look. And, you can begin to think what this infographic will look like a few years from now.