Netflix Accounts For 20% Of Peak U.S. Internet Bandwidth: Study
Sandvine Report Finds Median Monthly Data Usage in North America is 4 GB
By Todd Spangler -- Multichannel News, 10/20/2010 12:09:52 PM
Netflix represents more than 20% of downstream Internet traffic during peak times in the U.S. -- and is heaviest in the primetime hours of 8 to 10 p.m., according to a new report from bandwidth management equipment vendor Sandvine.
Overall, Internet users in North America still trail other regions in consumption: North American households use a median of 4 Gigabytes per month of Internet bandwidth, whereas in Asia-Pacific region the median is 12 Gigabytes. According to Sandvine's 2009 report, the worldwide monthly median usage last year was 3 Gigabytes.
Meanwhile, in North America the average time a fixed connection is active is 3 hours, whereas in Asia-Pacific it's closer to 5.5 hours.
Sandvine's eighth annual bandwidth study, "Fall 2010 Global Internet Phenomena," was based on data collected from more than 200 cable, DSL and mobile service providers worldwide over August and September 2010.
Netflix, which had about 16.9 million subscribers as of the end of September 2010, provides its "Watch Now" Internet streaming service on more than 100 devices, including TiVo DVRs, Roku, Apple TV, Google TV, Microsoft Xbox 360, Sony PlayStation3, Nintendo Wii, and many Internet-connected TVs and Blu-ray Disc players.
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Offbeatmammal opined, “…you have to… investigate P2P delivery of on-demand content to spread and optimize the load.”
I'm hardly a network engineer, but it strikes me that an extra 20% of backbone capacity is easy to predict, plan, provision and pay for. In contrast, a few extra Netflix users per neighborhood could require a more-expensive doubling of capacity in every neighborhood, which would go unused 22 hrs/day.
If so, P2P solves the easy problems of server + backbone capacity and solves the difficult last mile capacity problem not at all — in fact, it probably worsens it.
Walt French - 10/21/2010 3:20:09 PM EDT -
wow, that's a pretty scary number... and should give Comcast, Verizon and the like pause to consider what that's doing to their old-school media business.
At the same time you have to wonder what sort of stress sustained streaming is putting on the infrastructure and how much of an advantage it would be for both Netflix and the carriers to start to investigate P2P delivery of on-demand content to spread and optimize the load (for instance I'd be happy to have content cached on my local system and delivered to a neighbour to save Comcast doing backhaul... but only if Comcast didn't expect to bill me for helping out!)
Offbeatmammal - 10/21/2010 12:06:34 PM EDT
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