Earlier this year, Arbor Networks took a moment to consider the idea of Google as an ISP, and determined that the search giant would actually be the third-largest carrier in the world.  Now Arbor Networks has revisited the concept, and it believes Google’s moved up a step in the rankings.

Craig Labovitz, who holds the title "Chief Scientist" at Arbor Networks, explained how that’s possible in a blog post.  After discussing the company’s financial achievements, he wrote, "This month, Google broke an equally impressive Internet traffic record – gaining more than 1% of all Internet traffic share since January."

Labovitz also wrote, "Google now represents an average 6.4% of all Internet traffic around the world.  This number grows even larger (to as much as 8-12%) if I include estimates of traffic offloaded by the increasingly common Google Global Cache (GGC) deployments and error in our data due to the extremely high degree of Google edge peering with consumer networks."

Those are some rather stunning statistics.  It’s hard to imagine that any one company could be responsible for so much traffic worldwide.  And it’s even harder to believe a company could both pull that off and still be growing.

The findings do create some interesting possibilities where Google and its experimental ultra high-speed broadband networks are concerned, though.

Perhaps what Arbor Networks found should have some of the world’s top ISPs looking over their shoulders every now and then.