Dick Nordvold sent around this mind bending citation today (Billions and Billions of Gigabytes Served – from Internetnews.com) as part of his diligent efforts to make the case for building a FTTH project on the Iron Range.

Dick is the recently retired founder director of the Iron Range Resources’ Do I.T.! Project, and a member of the Blandin Foundation’s Broadband Strategy Board. Dick is passionate about this project because it would bring world class high speed internet access to 13 towns and one Indian tribe on the Range.

It’s an expensive project, requiring upwards of $50 million of public subsidy to build. Although plenty of folks now recognize the importance of high speed internet access for healthy rural economies, in an environment where gaming and entertainment dominate internet use it is still challenging to make the case for why we need really big pipes. This does a pretty good job.

Here are the really cool numbers from the article (Billions and Billions of Gigabytes Served – from Internetnews.com):

Last year, 161 exabytes (exabyte is a billion gigabytes) of digital information were created, representing roughly 3 million times the information in all the books ever written. Or, if you prefer, the equivalent of 12 stacks of books, each extending more than 92 million miles from the earth to the sun.

They then cite a new report that says that as many as 988 billion gigabytes of digital information will be created in 2010, a six-fold increase from 2006.