Internet Community How much space is required to store 2 mins of data captured from all internet traffic in Mauritius?

It is a question that probably many people are asking after reading the news since last week-end.

Ish Sookun

1 min read min read

The question above is straight-forward and the answer lies in the bandwidth that we, Mauritians, consume. In order to learn about the bandwidth consumption, I checked the ICT report published by Statistics Mauritius.

I quote from the report —

In 2021, International Bandwidth usage increased to 211,312 Megabits per second (Mbits/s) from 144,973 in 2020.

That number is not fixed because internet traffic changes all time, every day, every second. However, we can use it to base our calculation.

Let's first convert the number into Megabytes, which is understood by many. To do so, we divide the number by 8, because 1 byte = 8 bits. Thus, 211,312 Megabits is equivalent to 26,414 Megabytes.

Let's make it even more readable by converting it to Gigabytes. To do that we divide 26,414 by 1024. We get 25.7 Gigabytes or let's simply round it up to 26 Gigabytes.

Now, that's approximately the amount of information that flows through the internet cable every second. If we have store the information that is transferred during 2 mins, it'll be 120 seconds multiplied by 26 Gigabytes, which results to 3,120 Gigabytes.

Result — 3.12 Terabytes


The purpose of this blog post is to make computing fun and help people research on such topics. It is not to hurt anyone's sentiments.

If my calculation is wrong, please ping me on Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn.