Classroom Companion: Business

20.1.2 
 Processing
The doubling time for the processing capacity in terms of instructions processed 
per second (IPS) is estimated to be 1 year and 2 months for general purpose com-
puters and 10 months for application-specific computers (e.g., supercomputers). 
The processing capacity cannot be determined exactly since it is a complex func-
tion of variables such as memory capacity and organization, clock rate, program-
20.1 · Zettabyte Era

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ming language, computer architecture, and operating system. The above numbers 
are therefore crude estimates of the doubling time for the processing capacity.
20.1.3 
 Distribution
In 1993, more than 30% of the telecommunications networks and almost all broad-
cast networks were still analog even though the digitization of these networks 
started 20 years earlier. In 2020, the digitization is complete, and all information 
sent over the telecommunications networks is digital. Since 2000, the Internet has 
become the dominant carrier of information. The doubling time for the capacity of 
the Internet has been 1 year and 8 months during the last 20 years as shown in 
.
Fig. 
20.3
. In 2016, one zettabyte of data was transmitted over the Internet. The 
largest contributor to the traffic growth is video streaming.
0%
10%
20%
30%
40%
50%
60%
70%
80%
90%
100%
1990
1995
2000
2005
2010
2015
2020
Digital data
Year
. Fig. 20.1 Percentage digitally stored data. (Authors’ own figure)
 
Chapter 20 · Big Data Economics

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