San Francisco — “Real-time entertainment” in general transcends web browsing as top activity in peak hours… Netflix Inc. has become the single biggest source of peak downstream Internet traffic in the U.S., accounting for 24.71 percent of aggregate traffic, according to a latest report by Sandvine.
“Netflix is now the uncontested bandwidth king of the Internet in North America,” Canadian networking gear company Sandvine concluded in a Global Internet Phenomena Report. The streaming video service now accounts for 29.7 percent of peak downstream traffic, up from 21 percent last fall.
Interestingly, in Latin America, Facebook has become a bigger source of traffic than YouTube, according to the semi-annual report of Sandvine Inc., a Waterloo, Ontario, Canada, maker of Internet networking equipment and software.
Sandvine’s Global Internet Phenomena Report released from data furnished by the company’s clients — more than 220 Internet service providers in 85 countries. Sandvine publishes the report to help its clients prepare for changes in bandwidth consumption.
“Subscribers have clearly hooked-up on the Netflix streaming service, fundamentally altering the Internet landscape,” the firm continued in its findings.
“Moreover, the success of Netflix’s expansion into Canada suggests that it is not a phenomenon localized just to the United States.”
However, the spike in traffic devoted to real-time entertainment has cut the most into web browsing. Web browsing made up 38.7% of traffic in 2009, dropped to 20.2% of traffic in 2010 and is now at 16.6% of traffic.
The above figures shows that Netflix now accounts for 29.7 percent of downstream traffic — flowing to the consumer’s computer or mobile device — during peak times. That is a 44 percent increase since Sandvine’s previous report issued last Fall. Besides, the survey also took into account hundreds of millions of subscribers in over 85 countries, so it also compiled statistics from Latin America and Europe as well.
Netflix also accounts for about a third of all download traffic — not surprising, since high-definition streaming is a major bandwidth hog. Another really interesting discovery from this survey involves the share of traffic devoted to P2P filesharing. Netflix ended up surpassing BitTorrent for both download (29.70 vs. 10.37 percent) and aggregate Internet traffic (24.71 vs. 17.23 percent).
Furthermore, Netflix widened its borders from the United States to Canada in September with the inclusion of a streaming online movie rental service in that country. Subscribers pay monthly fees to watch films or television show episodes.
However, in its most recent earnings figures, Netflix claimed to have 23.6 million subscribers, 800,000 of which were in Canada. In addition, the vast majority of Netflix shows were watched using videogame consoles or personal computers, according to Sandvine.
Netflix is now gearing up to launch in another international market this year, although it has not given any hints as to where. But as Netflix CEO Reed Hastings indicates, bandwidth to the home keeps increasing including demand — he expects a gigabit to the home to be commonplace within ten years.