Netflix, the bandwidth hog
Remember how the major corporate ISPs used file sharing ‘bandwidth hogs’ as an excuse to impose traffic throttling on everyone?
Wonder what they’ll be doing about netFlix and Google’s YouTube?
“Though Netflix has had a troubling few months, losing 800,000 customers in the past few months alone thanks to price hikes, remaining customers show no sign of slowing down their streaming consumption. According to a new report, Netflix eats up 32.7 percent of peak downstream traffic in United State”, says PC Magazine, going on:
“That’s an increase of 10 percent since spring, according to Sandvine’s Global Internet Phenomena Report, and makes Netflix the largest Internet service on North America’s fixed access networks. Second to Netflix is HTTP, which eats up with 17.8 percent of bandwidth, followed by YouTube at 10 percent and BitTorrent at 9 percent.
“Netflix also makes up 29 percent of peak period aggregate traffic, with HTTP coming in second at 16.6 percent, and 23.3 percent of daily aggregate traffic; BitTorrent is second at 16.5 percent, according to stats collected in September.
“Sandvine is skeptical that recent PR woes will lead to a reduction in Netflix usage, but suggests that the service might have hit its peak.
Who, or what, is Sandvine? and why should anyone care?
It’s a Canadian company that’s cashed in on Traffic Optimization’ (read bandwidth throttling.)
It also once levelled a ‘take it down in 30 minutes or else‘ threat at p2pnet.
“The fact that more video traffic is going to devices other than a PC should be a wake-up call that counting bytes is no longer sufficient for network planning,the story has Sandvine boss” Dave Caputo, CEO stating, adding “Communications Service Providers need to have detailed business intelligence on not only the devices being used but also the quality and length of the videos being watched so they can engineer for a high subscriber quality of experience and not simply adding capacity through continuous capital investment.” and guess who says it can supply that information?
“On mobile devices, YouTube eats up the largest amount of downstream traffic, though apps like PPStream and Netflix “are making inroads,” Sandvine said.
Just how much data are consumers using? – asks PC Magazine, answering”The median usage in North America actually dropped from 7GB to 5.8GB per month; among heavy users it dropped from 23GB to 22.7GB.
according to the Sandvine’ report, “From 2009 to 2010, the major changes to the peak period composition of North America’s fixed networks is the increasing presence of Real-Time Entertainment, and a slight rebound in the levels of P2P Filesharing traffic (which has increased to 19.2%). Real-Time Entertainment now accounts for 42.6% of total peak period bytes, up significantly from less than 30% a year ago. In turn, Web
Browsing has suffered the largest decline, now only accounting for 20.2% of total traffic.”
Not only but also, “P2P Filesharing has experienced a major decline,
dropping to represent only 5.6% of peak period bytes on mobile networks,” says Sandvine. (Rolls eyes)
October 29th, 2011 at 3:33 am
“Netflix also makes up 29 percent of peak period aggregate traffic, with HTTP coming in second at 16.6 percent, and 23.3 percent of daily aggregate traffic; BitTorrent is second at 16.5 percent, according to stats collected in September.
So fucking what? There’s always something at the top. Urine makes up 80% of a sanitary sewer system’s effluent. Empty neurons make up 99.99999999 % of an ISP marketing executive’s brain.
Given that (as I understand it), they are owned by a sleazy ISP that has >2 million customers, why report anything they say as fact?
THE REAL STORY IS THAT CANADIAN ISP’s ARE GOUGING SCUMBAGS THAT ARE UTTERLY INCAPABLE OF DELIVERING DECENT BANDWIDTH AT A REASONABLE PRICE! // That’s the story, but it’s not news either.
October 29th, 2011 at 1:15 pm
The ISPs used to justify their routine practice of throttling Bittorrent by insisting that they were forced to choke out the net’s biggest bandwidth hog to reduce network congestion for everyone else. So why is that same rationale never applied when a billion-dollar corporate entity like Netflix is now the worst culprit? (OK, I think we all know the answer to that)
Does this mean that the only way to get freeware movies like “Sita Sings the Blues” without getting punished by the bandwidth police is to abandon Bittorrent and pay for the *originally free* movie, if and when it ever becomes available on Netflix or other pay-service?
November 12th, 2011 at 12:24 pm
Why does it matter how I legally use the bandwidth I purchase. I pay for a certain amount of up and downstream bandwidth. How my provider gets my traffic to and from a service I wish to use is totally irrelevant. My use of my internet connection isn’t depriving anyone else of the use of theirs. What Sandvine should focus on is total network infrastructure investment by the telecoms as a percentage of profits. What you will find is these companies are shorting investment in their networks to fuel ever higher corporate profits. If they did reasonable annual investment in growing their networks there wouldn’t be a bandwidth problem in the first place.