Will the SKA's total bandwidth still exceed the Earth's internet's bandwidth? In the early 2010's there were many popular articles that said that the total bandwidth of the the Square Kilometer Array's optical fiber network for raw data from each dish would be larger than the Earth's internet. Here is just one example:

Wikipedia's Square Kilometre Array
:


  It would require very high performance central computing engines and long-haul links with a capacity greater than the global Internet traffic as of 2013.3


As you can see that link is broken.

The SKA project has several Precursors, pathfinders and design studies but the SKA proper has not been built yet, and perhaps is not even finalized.

Still, with available data, by the time it might be built (2025?) is it likely to still exceed the Earth's internet's bandwidth?
Will the SKA's total bandwidth still exceed the Earth's Internet's bandwidth?

No.

First some conversions:

1024 Gigabytes = 1 Terabyte
1024 Terabytes = 1 Petabyte
1024 Petabytes = 1 Exabyte
1024 Exabytes = 1 Zettabyte

From the SKA Telescope website: &quot;The Operational Model&quot; (.PDF), on the webpage: &quot;Info Sheets&quot;, this explanation and graphic is offered:

&quot;The data journey

Basic data products will be produced and stored in Cape Town for SKA1-mid and Perth for SKA1-low. From there, they will be delivered to a global alliance of SKA Regional Centres for further processing and archiving and access by the user community.

New data models will need to be developed as current software packages for radio astronomy data reduction don’t have the capabilities to handle the SKA’s large bandwidths and Field of View dataset.&quot;.





&quot;Major dates


SKA1 OPERATIONAL CONCEPT DOCUMENT - Operational Principles



late 2027 - Commencement of Key Science Projects (KSPs)

late 2026 - Commencement of PI-led programmes

2024–2027 - Key Science Project (KSP) planning &amp; proposals

2022 - Start of Observatory &amp; Science commissioning

2020 - Start of construction activities

2017–2018 - Prototypes deployed at the telescope sites&quot;



See also: &quot;SKA Community Briefing – 18 January 2017&quot;, page 12:

Nothing will flow to /dev/null.
Source: Cisco - Global - IP Traffic: https://www.cisco.com/c/m/en_us/solutions/service-provider/vni-forecast-highlights.html#


Globally, IP traffic will grow 3-fold from 2017 to 2022, a compound annual growth rate of 26%.

Globally, IP traffic will reach 396.0 EB per month by 2022, up from 122.4 EB per month in 2017.

Global IP networks will carry 13.0 EB per day by 2022, up from 4.0 EB per day in 2017.


...
Internet Traffic

Globally, Internet traffic will grow 3.7-fold from 2017 to 2022, a compound annual growth rate of 30%.

Globally, busy hour Internet traffic will grow 4.8-fold from 2017 to 2022, a compound annual growth rate of 37%.

Globally, Internet traffic will reach 350.8 EB per month by 2022, up from 96.0 EB per month in 2017.

Global Internet traffic will be 11.5 EB per day by 2022, up from 3.2 EB per day in 2017.

Global Internet traffic by 2022 will be equivalent to 1 trillion DVDs per year, 88 billion DVDs per month, or 120 million DVDs per hour.

By 2022, the gigabyte equivalent of all movies ever made will cross the Internet every 1 minutes.

Global Internet traffic by 2022 will be equivalent to 193x the volume of the entire Global Internet in 2005.


...

No, it's not even close.