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Will Netflix Destroy the Internet?
nicholasjay writes "Netflix is swallowing America's bandwidth and it probably won't be long before it comes for the rest of the world. That's one of the headlines from Sandvine's Fall 2010 Global Internet Phenomena Report, an exhaustive look at what people around the world are doing with their Internet lines. According to Sandvine, Netflix accounts for 20 percent of downstream Internet traffic during peak home Internet usage hours in North America. That's an amazing share — it beats that of YouTube, iTunes, Hulu, and, perhaps most tellingly, the peer-to-peer file-sharing protocol BitTorrent."
First, they've known this was coming for ages. P2P have been around well over a decade and everybody knew people were downloading movies and TV shows and watching them on their computer. It's just hitting bigtime mainstream now and Netflix was the first commercial entity which did it right.
Second, the 'Will Porn/Youtube/Torrents/P2P/Netflix/etc Destroy The Internet?" articles have been around for ages. The providers adapt, the technology adapts.
I call it 'The Aristocrats'
Most ISP's in the US already have a (high) data cap. Whatever you do under that, they will not care. If there were (or are) any ISP's with "unlimited" bandwidth then they will have to change policy also to have some kind of data cap, because they do not get "unlimited" bandwidth from the people they purchase internet connectivity from.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
The average person has a 60gb cap in Canada. People have quickly found out that they can blow through 1/2 to 3/4's of their monthly cap in a weekend. I'm sure it'll be more interesting as winter rolls around, we like snow, hockey, and all that. But curling up to watch a movie or 4 when it's -40C and snowing out is much better fun. Especially if there's a 30% chance you're going to spend 3hrs shoveling.
But sandvine is a blight on the internet. You can happily hear about all the horror stories(look on dslreports.com) that they've inflicted on Canadians, as ISP's use their equipment to throttle just about everything. Bell enjoys using them after the last mile, before switching to outside networks, even when you're on another ISP. So regardless of what happens, you're still being throttled by bell. Rogers like using it to throttle everywhere, that they think the consumption might be too high, or where growth is outpacing their delayed upgrades.
Om, nomnomnom...
Umm, the internet was designed to be a redundant communications network to keep military bases connected. It was to address the concern that a nuclear war would knock out communication to underground bunkers at the Pentagon, Cheyenne Mountain, and SAC HQ.
It was never envisioned to be a commercial or entertainment vehicle.
The FRESH AIR service is over rated. It's polluted by too much reality programming.
Excuse my trolling for karma here, but there's a good comment below that article that's worth noting (which I only remembered because I saw this article when it was first posted a while ago).
Farhad, Allow me to make one clarification on the Sandvine report cited. While the growth of Netflix has certainly been dramatic, it does not (yet) account for 90% of Internet traffic on any of the networks included in our study. Rather, As you noted correctly, we did see Netflix accounting for approximately 20% of downstream traffic in North America.
The confusion on the 90% stat probably resulted from a misreading of one of the graphs featured in our “Spotlight On: Netflix” on page 15 of our Fall Global Internet Phenomena report. The graph was accompanied with the caption “An average day for Netflix on this network, peaking at 9:30pm” This particular graph (taken from a single network in Canada) shows Netflix traffic throughout the day as a relative percentage of the peak amount of Netflix traffic. In this case, the peak was reached at 9:30pm, so the curve at that point has a value of 100%. The rest of the curve shows how Netflix traffic varies: so we see that at midnight the level of Netflix is approximately 42% of what it was at 9:30pm. In hindsight, I think we probably could have explained this better in our report.
Our Network Analytics product produces these “Time of Day” graphs so that network operators can understand how subscriber usage of various applications, services, or categories of application vary throughout a typical day. Thanks again for the interesting article.
Sincerely, Tom Donnelly, EVP Marketing, Sandvine
Libertarians somehow believe that private businesses should be stronger than governments but weaker than individuals.
As TFA implies, selection has improved greatly over the past year or two.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
that was supposed to be only for the testing group
problem is it never ended
http://www.networkworld.com/community/blog/why-ipv6-vint-cerf-keeps-blaming-himself
some wanted a 128bit others a 32bit..
'...if only "Jumping to a Conclusion" was an event in the Olympics.'
Yeah. If the regulators had had their way we'd all have ISDN by now.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
What are you talking about. Netflix runs in Firefox just fine. It also runs on the Wii and the xbox 360. You can also buy a $99 box sold separately to run in on your tv if you so desire. Pretty sure it's here to stay.
They already use akamai and in fact use them even more now. http://www.businessinsider.com/akamai-gets-more-of-netflixs-business-but-at-a-very-low-price-2010-3
FYI, Netflix works just fine from Firefox running under Windows (at least it does on my home XP box). And no, aside from inside of a virtual host there is no way to watch Netflix instant streaming movies with Linux.
I Am My Own Worst Enemy
It was designed to connect research institutions (universities) to each other and to military research institutions (DARPA). It was not designed to be resistant to attack, much less nuclear attack. The ability to reroute is, and was, necessary because physical equipment and lines are prone to intermittent failure.
You, and whoever modded you Informative, are ignorant idiots.
Seriously, is there a way to stream Netflix under Linux yet (aside from in a VM?)
Why bother? It's only 1% of the market, if that.
Watch it in a VM, or watch it on your Wii, or your Xbox, or your PS3, or your bluray player, or any of the scores of other devices that stream Netflix.
Yes, Netflix works in all browsers, it just doesn't work on Linux. And frankly, most people don't care.
Security is mostly a superstition... Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. - Helen Keller
Here is the problem. They want to MAXIMIZE profit from the bandwidth. Not get a good profit or healthy profit, but MAXIMIZE it in any way possible. Comcast does it by intentionally not upgrading their downstream paths. Even 10 years ago Comcast was capable of 10BaseT speeds Up and Down over cable modems to the headends for ALL the people in the area that headend serves. The problem is that headend is connected via fiber to a larger headend. That larger headend has another 5-10 connect to it, and a Single OC3 feeds 5+ cities if you are lucky for it to have an OC3. The area I worked in was selling 5Mbit service and I knew that the backend was nothing more than 2 bonded t3's that way too little bandwidth for the number of subs on that POP.
ISP's are screwing the pooch in increasing their backbone connection speeds. Until they get a LOT of complaints, they will continue to major oversell the available bandwidth. it's now well past the 100 to 1 ratio at most.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Netflix uses Akamai.
It doesn't hurt to be nice.
A lot of people really don't understand that. They probably have cheap hosting accounts, and have never needed to deal with actual circuits.
I've worked at places with multiple GigE circuits. Besides the base cost in the datacenter (floor space, power, port charges, etc), we had negotiated contracts on bandwidth. 95th percentile is that bastard of a number that we deal with all the time. For those that don't know, it goes something like this. The uplink provider monitors our ports once every 5 minutes. At the end of the month, they take all the samples, sort them by utilization, and knock off the top 5%. Whatever that next number is, is what we pay. There are dedicated rates too. If you don't use the line, that doesn't matter, you're paying at lest a minimum fixed amount, which could be something like 20% of the line capacity. So an idle datacenter with nothing in it, but it has a GigE circuit could cost as if we were using 200Mb/s at 95th percentile.
For our bills, it was easily over $100,000/mo. That's a conservative number, but I haven't been there in a while, and don't remember how high it really went. Do you want fancier services, like multiple circuits into your space, BGP routing, etc? Oh, the price goes way up. When you get big enough, and want to get your data to the customers faster, you start doing private peerings, and putting out edge nodes (servers closer to the clients, like Akamai provides), or even putting dedicated servers in on the end user networks. They don't like paying huge bandwidth and peering bills, when they can deploy $100k worth of equipment two hops from the customer.
If NetFlix is sucking up so much bandwidth, someone's making a fortune on it already. So it accounts for 20%, big deal, that doesn't indicate the total utilization of the available, or even where it was measured. I played this game once. I took the total bandwidth my company used during peak hours, and compared it to the Mae East bandwidth graphs (when they were public). Our bandwidth used 15% of what Mae East passed. And guess what. It didn't destroy the world. We weren't even responsible for 15% of what passed through Mae East, because various peerings meant our traffic went in all kinds of different directions.
By that standard, NetFlix could use 200% of what passes through Mae East (plural now), and even that wouldn't mean anything other than bragging rights. Sure, it's a lot of bandwidth, but it doesn't indicate saturation of available resources, nor the end of anything at all.
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.