How Heavy Is the Internet?

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It’s not every day that we discover the answer to such a simple question. And because it’s the weekend, we might as well have some fun talking about the weight of the Internet.

Have you ever wondered how heavy the Internet is? Well I know I haven’t but it’s still fun to see that some folks have asked themselves this question. And it looks like the guys over at CNET UK have carefully and methodically calculated the weight of the Internet. So let’s take a brief look at the number they came up with.

It looks like 570,937,778 computers are connected to the Internet which happen to weigh 22,837,511,120kg. That includes desktops, laptops and various peripherals. The servers needed to make the Internet works weigh 1,745,809,310kg and Netcraft estimates that there are about 175,480,931 servers around the world. Naturally we need cables to make the Internet work and there are about 15,000km of TAT-14 cable that bring the Internet to us. They weigh 87,000,000kg.

And we don’t go online only from computers. We use smartphones too. And of those smartphones, the iPhones and the BlackBerries are the most popular. 42 million iPhones have been sold so far and they weigh around 6,075,000kg while 50 million BlackBerry phones sold to date weigh 6,800,000kg.

The fun part of the report comes from measuring the weight of viruses and the websites that make the Internet possible. The viruses don’t weigh anything although there are 287,524 viruses available for you to experience. The websites weigh 0.01kg although that’s not something you can truly weigh. But in case you are wondering there are 85 billion pages stored by The Internet Archive and that number is rising.

The grand total amounts to 489,438,559,990kg and that number is definitely rising. Hopefully we won’t have to move the Internet anywhere since it looks like it’s very heavy. In case you want to translate that into pounds, then go ahead and do it. The number you get is still impressive. Oh, and just in case you think the math doesn’t make much sense well then you’d be totally right. But then again, the Internet can’t be actually weighed, can it?