The Internet is going private. It’s also grown to 138 Tbps of capacity

The world is still sucking down bandwidth like it’s an elixir of the gods, with global bandwidth demand reaching 138 Tbps in 2013, a 4.5 fold increase from the 30 Tbps of capacity from five years before.

But it’s the mix of that growth that’s worth noting, according to a report out from Telegeography.

Traffic on private networks owned by Facebook, Amazon, Google and other web giants is driving the majority of that growth -- about 55 percent of it averaged over that five-year period between 2009 and 2013. The remainder comes from public network traffic operated by carriers like AT&T, Comcast, Level 3 and others. Those public carriers still make up most of the traffic, however.