20% of All Peak Traffic Due to 3.5M Netflix Data Hogs?

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Based solely on assumptions made by a single analyst, we know that X percentage of broadband users are streaming movies while Y amount of people are online = NETFLIX IS KILLING YOUR INTERTUBES!!!

Greenfield’s math starts with the assumption that approximately 6-7 percent of broadband users were streaming Netflix content during peak hours and that about 70 percent of broadband users, or 56 million, use their Internet connections during peak hours. From there, he estimates the number of Netflix subscribers streaming during that time — 3.5 million — which is roughly one-third of Netflix users who stream content, and only one-fifth of its total subscriber base of 16.9 million. If true, that’s an astonishingly small number of users driving an incredibly large amount of broadband traffic.
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Streaming content doesn't really use that much...

I just did a test sstreaming 1080p footage while monitoring my incoming connection. The most it ever peaked at was 4Mb/s (I hate megabits idiocy) Downloading 16gb games off steam its much much higher.
 
People have been too busy focusing on upgrading the speed to their house but not the speed of the backbones. What did you think was going to happen? That's why I prefer low ping connections over high bandwidth connections.
 
Data HOGS? More like normal internet users...... cable companies really need to stop whining about this..... they need to do what every business on earth does, upgrade to the things your clients need. The needs to upgrade their broadband equipment (and take the bill, not pass it on to customers) to take on all these new forms of emerging video/audio in high definition.

GET WITH THE TIMES COMCRAP AND TIME WARNER, YOU NEED TO UPGRADE AND CHANGE, NOT THE USERS!
 
They forget my wife's father who just discovered internet/youtube and sits on it 12/7, literally, watching something non-stop.
 
I share a connection and holy shit does netflix wreck my ability to play games online.

and then when I see they were watching crap from 20 years ago that they have seen 50 times and probably own on vhs I want to scream. I really need to upgrade the pipe, or get my own.
 
O no, our customers are now using the services we where banking on only 1% using!!!!

It is called over subscribing... Promising 10Mbit lines to 20 people when the service behind them can only support maybe 1...
 
I bet someone at Netflix knows the truth. But really, 20% of prime time bandwidth from a single service? Do they have a pipe that big?
 
Or you could just get a router (tomato powered) with individual bandwidth allocation, and give them enough bandwidth for low quality video. :D
 
Remember, it's all Netflix, Facebook, and Youtube's fault.

And also, the cable companies cannot upgrade their infrastructure because they do not have the money. Comcast and Time Warner's net income was only 3.6 and 2.47 billion dollars last year!

No one is going back to DSL, so I guess we are just stuck.
 
Why does it feel like there is so much news about Netflix lately?
 
But if they upgrade too much, then more and more people are going to ditch cable and just steam everything. Content providers have much less control over streams than cable, and so advertisers pay them less (since its much easier to avoid the advertisements). Plus there's that HORRIBLE spectre of only buying what you want to see, rather than hundreds of channels of crap on most cable plans.

So, these guys are trying to delay things as long as possible, desperately hoping that they'll be able to entrench themselves in the new distribution setups and continue raking in the dough. I expect the footdragging on new infrastructure to continue.
 
Oh come on! We all know that the real "Data Hogs" are not those streaming Netflix, or watching YouTube, its those watching/downloading pron. After them its the people on Facebook playing games, and/or Twitter... :rolleyes:
 
Netflix is also less of an issue than some things because it uses Akamai. Akamai's business model is in cache engines. So they have massive data centers to be sure, but what sets them apart from other hosting companies is they go and put cache engines in ISPs. They contact an ISP and say "Hey, we'll provide you with free servers and switching hardware, as well as instructions to set it up. You agree to host it in your data center. The net effect will be lower bandwidth usage for you." Most ISPs go for this as it does significantly lower your bandwidth usage and costs you nothing other than the power for some servers in your rack. Akamai then get the benefit of lower bandwidth in their data canters.

However what this means is that if something comes off of Akamai, there's a decent chance it gets cached and is all in-network. So often when you watch a Netflix movie, your ISP isn't spending any bandwidth outside on it, it is cached inside already. Not 100% of the time, of course, but fairly often.

Analysts need to STFU about Netflix killing the Internet. Does it use a lot of bandwidth? Sure, so does a lot of shit these days. It's fine, the Internet backbone keeps growing to meet demand. We'll live.
 
My "high bandwidth" use of my 50Mbps is primarily focused on *cought*acquiring stuff*cough* that I want, but that's very rarely more than something that takes a few minutes to *cough*acquire*cough*. The speed of the connection makes things happen fast as it should so... I'm not maxing it out 24/7 like some folks do, and while Cox does post "limits" on the bandwidth they have never ever bothered me about it, probably because of that fact that I don't have it maxed out 24/7.

There's a lot of stuff out there, that's for sure, but I suppose I'm picky in what I *cough*acquire*cough*. I know I could literally get anything I want if I put time and effort into it, and yes that means anything, but finding something would the download - even if it takes 5-10 minutes tops - is actually pretty rare for me.

As for streaming video from Netflix or Hulu or whatever, I can download that content (oops... did I say that out loud?) completely to my local drive for safe storage 10-20x faster than streaming it in real-time. I don't see the point in streaming aside from saving some costs for the physical media and packaging but that's just me I suppose.

Personally, my stance is "streaming sucks" and it will for a long long time to come. Besides, my Wife is deaf and none of the big streaming services support captions/subtitles on every damned video they have which is patently stupid overall - the technology of streaming has supported captioning and subtitle streams for years now, they're just being lazy bastards in implementing it. I've been offered free Netflix memberships - not just trial memberships, but full blown 3 month, 6 month, and even a 1 year free membership in the past - and I passed on them every time since the amount of content my Wife can actually watch is barely 1% of the total number of titles any of those services offer.

Fuck 'em... deaf people are customers too. If they can't or won't respect that, I have no use for 'em at all.
 
It all just sounds like the ISP's looking for any reason to justify switching to a metered pricing model which would basically destroy the internet as we use it today.
 
Jim Robbins said:
I bet someone at Netflix knows the truth. But really, 20% of prime time bandwidth from a single service? Do they have a pipe that big?
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Netflix uses Content Delivery Networks to handle the bulk of the streaming, and the CDNs do have pretty big pipes (well actually they have a lot of reasonably sized pipes direct to ISP networks.

Even so, a claim like this seems pretty unlikely. There's just too much porn out there for Netflix to be 20%. :)
 
Sycraft said:
Analysts need to STFU about Netflix killing the Internet. Does it use a lot of bandwidth? Sure, so does a lot of shit these days. It's fine, the Internet backbone keeps growing to meet demand. We'll live.
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Agreed, but the backbone needs improvement, compared to other developed contries' speeds, according to recent articles. This would only make sense in a capistalistic environment, where service/goods providers use "free" bandwidth to hawk their services, as well as consumers who do the same to buy them. Not saying that prices should go up, mind you, but that some of the profit needs to be re-invested to keep up with demand.

This crap perpetuates because in this instant gratification culture these days, when people can't get what they want when they want it, it's always SOMEONE ELSE'S fault and responsibility, isn't it? We need to blame and hate these days, apparently.

Netflix is certainly less guilty than the unofficial consortium of porn streamers. Add up the individual porn watchers' bandwidth, and I bet it would eclipse Netflix. Then tack on bandwidth used by illegal filesharing...

We cheer the success of David until he becomes Goliath, then we bitch and complain. Unfortunately, we don't usually complain constructively to the right entities, and seek to preach to the choir instead.
 
Using a service you pay good money for does not make you a data hog.

It makes you a customer.

Of course, the ISP's don't see it that way.
 
DeathPrincess said:
Streaming content doesn't really use that much...

I just did a test sstreaming 1080p footage while monitoring my incoming connection. The most it ever peaked at was 4Mb/s (I hate megabits idiocy) Downloading 16gb games off steam its much much higher.
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it uses enough that on my stable 10 megabit line when my wife is streaming in the living room on the 360 i can't play intense multiplayer games like Crysis without there being issues
 
i wanted to mention that we have not one device, but many connected too. i dont know if we are typical or average by todays standards, but we have two Android smartphones, an Xbox 360, a Wii (which also streams Netflix), a BluRay player, a desktop PC and a laptop PC all connected to the network. of course they dont all access the internet at the same time, but it is not uncommon a several to be online at once

i didn't read the article yet, but did it take into account nearly every new tv and bluray player being sold this holiday season will be streaming netflix (assuming most poeple pay for the service to stream for $8) and youtube on these devices, Hulu, web browsers integrated in to everything..etc.......Netflix is but one albeit large bandwidth consumer
 
niconx said:
People have been too busy focusing on upgrading the speed to their house but not the speed of the backbones. What did you think was going to happen? That's why I prefer low ping connections over high bandwidth connections.
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same, Suddenlink recently completed a massive backbone overhaul! I get a ping of 30-40ms to Chicago which is 800+ miles awaty!

 
niconx said:
People have been too busy focusing on upgrading the speed to their house but not the speed of the backbones. What did you think was going to happen? That's why I prefer low ping connections over high bandwidth connections.
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one is consumer driven, the other is provider driven, two very different realms
 
If they don't want people to download stuff maybe they shouldn't advertise their service as unlimited***.
 
clarkkent57 said:
Netflix isn't the consumer, it's the provider of a consumed service.
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Actually, they are:

Netflix has to buy the very content they're reselling as a service provider to their customers, and they're paying for their "Internet service" as well to get access to those fat pipes that are supposedly being choked. ;)
 
ScratchDrive said:
Data HOGS? More like normal internet users......
...

GET WITH THE TIMES COMCRAP AND TIME WARNER, YOU NEED TO UPGRADE AND CHANGE, NOT THE USERS!
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So true so damn true, plus people paid for that bandwidth, it's part of their contract, which they paid for.
And actually 7% of the users using 20% seems rather mild, it shows indeed that times have changed since there was a time that such use would represent 80% of traffic, but now everybody watches HD youtube clips and tons of other sources and the reality is that the use is going in the direction of what people actually were promised when signing up, although of course long from reaching even 25% on average I'm sure.

So yes, update ISP's and shut up, or sell your company to someone who can run an ISP decently and intelligently.
 
THIS JUST IN: People who pay for high-speed internet, um, use it...

The bulk of Netflix's videos are SD and use ~1.4Mbps. That's not exactly a lot. Carriers need to upgrade their systems and quit crying. They'll just pass the costs off to consumers anyway.
 
We have 3 Netflix users in the house, and we all have our HD streamed podcasts that we watch on nearly a daily basis. Our internet is clogged pretty much constantly, and we break nearly 750Gb a month in total bandwidth.
 
nobody_here said:
it uses enough that on my stable 10 megabit line when my wife is streaming in the living room on the 360 i can't play intense multiplayer games like Crysis without there being issues
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You need to prioritize your network traffic. Never done it myself, but my brother set up a cheap linux server and set priorities to the different programs so he wouldn't have this issue when downloading large files.
 
nobody_here said:
i wanted to mention that we have not one device, but many connected too. i dont know if we are typical or average by todays standards, but we have two Android smartphones, an Xbox 360, a Wii (which also streams Netflix), a BluRay player, a desktop PC and a laptop PC all connected to the network. of course they dont all access the internet at the same time, but it is not uncommon a several to be online at once

i didn't read the article yet, but did it take into account nearly every new tv and bluray player being sold this holiday season will be streaming netflix (assuming most poeple pay for the service to stream for $8) and youtube on these devices, Hulu, web browsers integrated in to everything..etc.......Netflix is but one albeit large bandwidth consumer
Click to expand...

Wireless network? Computer not directly connected to the router? If so, there's your problem. It's still one land line and the router has to pick favorites.
 
My household use's almost 200 gigs a month. There's 4 of us and we all watch netflix/Utube allot.
 
I work for an ISP and I know, for a fact, that video streaming services like Netflix are the reason out nodes get are saturated from 10am to 2am.
 
Not sure why no one mentioned this. But this is coming out now because the big ISPs want to introduce Tiered pricing. Haven't you guys seen the leaked slide shows? Wired has one, and I've seen it on other sites, as well. They want to charge extra, per month, for certain services, like Netflix, YouTube and whatever else uses any amount of bandwidth at all. This is in addition to your normal monthly fee. I wouldn't be surprised if the 'research' was paid for by them, either directly or indirectly.

These guys have a monopoly in my area. As I'm sure they do in many areas. I'd have no choice but to do as they told me if it came to that.
 
Comcast is of course trying to paint Netflix as evil, because Comcast is both ISP and Cable TV. And they don't want Netflix data traveling over the Comcast network.

Does Netflix actually shovel more data than YouTube?
 
I take this with a grain of salt. Until we have real numbers, then it's pointless to give any of these guesstimates any weight
 
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