Google's Traffic is Giant, Which is Why It Should Be Your ISP

Well, as Arbor Networks measures it, if Google were an ISP it would be the third largest in the world and the fastest growing -- if you are measuring the amount of traffic passed from its network to another.

Arbor sells network control and monitoring equipment to the net's biggest ISPs and networks, and knows as much about global network traffic as anyone does.

Now much of that traffic is due to YouTube, since when you measure by traffic a three- minute long video is the equivalent of thousands of pages of search results, but that's still a staggering number for a single company.

Moreover, Google has a dual strategy for moving away from paying top- level internet transit providers to serve as the middleman between its servers and the world's consumer ISPs.

Now, more than half of its transit traffic is sent to those networks via direct peering relationships, according to the data ISPs provide Arbor Networks anonymously.

Moreover, Google has been deploying banks of servers inside those same networks, so that traffic to Google's servers never has to leave an ISP, cutting down on lag time and transit costs. Arbor estimates that more than half of the ISPs in Europe and North America are home to a bank of servers known as a Google Global Cache.