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Will Netflix Destroy the Internet?

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the apocalypse-now-now dept.

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."

16 of 577 comments (clear)

  1. So, how long before... by Nevo · · Score: 5, Interesting

    ...my ISP starts punishing me for using the Internet to do legal things that the Internet was designed for?

    1. Re:So, how long before... by MBGMorden · · Score: 5, Interesting

      I don't know. This could be a GOOD thing. Previously, there seemed to be some stigma attached to high bandwidth users. Anyone who was using a lot of bandwidth was "obviously" doing SOMETHING shady. With the birth of services like this, it's starting to become quite common for regular old users to suck-up lots of bandwidth. I think the ISP's may finally have to pony up some dough and upgrade their infrastructure.

      Of course, if they'd had a bit of sense, they'd have realized a simple truth that applies to almost any computer usage, be it processing power, bandwidth, or anything else: today's power users use what tommorow's regular users are. Rather than trying to persecute your heavy users, use them as a metric to gauge what you need to roll out.

      --
      "People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
    2. Re:So, how long before... by hairyfeet · · Score: 5, Interesting

      500? 150? Hate to break the news to ya, but I'm in one of the "test markets" for the "new" caps, and guess what? It is 36Gb for residential and 76Gb for business so you can say goodbye to things like Netflix, because with caps THAT low, good luck watching movies on the net. Oh and if you go over? $1.50 per Gb! Of course these caps don't count for their own services, nor do they count for Windows updates because they are setting up a WSUS server. Now that net neutrality is dead expect expect to join me in suckitude my friends. My ISP is Cox but from what I was told once they roll it out nationally the others WILL fall suit.

      So enjoy while you can my friends, the party is nearly over. With caps that low the ISPs are gonna make out like robber barons, their test data shows the little old ladies and soccer moms won't be affected so there won't be any bitching from that circle, and of course I'm sure the *.A.A will be happy to throw lots of spin and marketing behind them to the tune of "Only thieves use THAT much bandwidth!" complete with charts in PPT showing how many MP3s or some other worthless comparison. Welcome to the future, where if you don't have FIOS (which from what I understand Verizon is quickly slowing or stopping rollouts all over the place) then you get to enjoy pre broadband Internet. Trust me, it does suck.

      --
      ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
    3. Re:So, how long before... by MindKata · · Score: 5, Insightful

      I would say, if "Netflix is swallowing America's bandwidth" then America bandwidth needs to increase.

      @parent post, I know you are joking about ISPs but this story is really a covert PR story by the anti net neutrality people. This same kind of story was tried in the UK using the example of the BBC iPlayer bandwidth, trying to say it was a major drain on UK Internet bandwidth ... which they then followed up with along the lines of “so hey, how about we charge extra for iPlayer bandwidth”, when the real problem was the UK bandwidth was and still is too low (just like America bandwidth). In countries with much faster internet access, these video services take up far less of the overall percentage of bandwidth and so do not swallow all the bandwidth.

      Scare stories like this are used as a marketing chess move by the anti net neutrality lot of lobbyists. They want to charge for specific kinds of data and in the UK the next move they are playing is also aiming to earn even more from then also spying on the data (via deep-packet inspection) which is also needed to kill net neutrality. (The growing Police State in the UK is also seeking to use deep-packet inspection for its 24/7 spying on everyone). Deep-packet inspection has to be made illegal globally or they will continue to push to exploit it.

      So to the idea "Netflix is swallowing America's bandwidth", I say, bullshit!, America needs and in time will have more bandwidth, so these reports are bullshit, no one needs to worry about these scare stories. Its like the old saying, follow the money, and the money people are behind stories like this.

      Plus oh what a surprise, Sandvine, the creators of this so called report, (Two faced PR marketing move more like), already use deep-packet inspection, so they would gain from killing net neutrality and selling their services.
      http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sandvine

      Sandvine you two faced bastards, we can see through your chess moves.

      --
      There are 10 kinds of people in the world... those who understand binary and those who don't.
    4. Re:So, how long before... by MoonBuggy · · Score: 5, Insightful

      It may just be that I'm misinterpreting your phrasing, but even while disagreeing with them you seem to have fallen into the ISP's trap: Google and Netflix are already paying for their upstream bandwidth. They pay upstream at the datacenter, the customers pay downstream at the home/office.

      What the ISPs want is for the content providers to pay something for the downstream at the customer's end as well as the customer.

      Incidentally, I get the impression that there's actually plenty of capacity, for the moment at least. Obviously upgrades cost money and must be ongoing, but my 50Mbps connection in London was reasonably priced (when split between a household of four), uncapped and provided close enough to the advertised speed that I was happy.

      It's less that they're worried about covering the cost of upgrades (although I'm sure that comes into it somewhat) and more that they just want to come up with a plausible sounding reason to be paid twice.

    5. Re:So, how long before... by Lumpy · · Score: 5, Informative

      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.
    6. Re:So, how long before... by JWSmythe · · Score: 5, Informative

      Google and Netflix are already paying for their upstream bandwidth

          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.
  2. Will posting inflammatory headlines by Nimey · · Score: 5, Insightful

    destroy Slashdot?

    It's well on the way - /. just isn't as relevant as it was years back.

    --
    Hail Eris, full of mischief...

    E pluribus sanguinem
  3. The answer is... by adamgolding · · Score: 5, Funny

    Yes. Clearly Netflix will 'destroy the internet'.

  4. Bandwidth? by Joehonkie · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Well, that bandwidth is what I pay my ISP for...

  5. Netflix rocks! by mrflash818 · · Score: 5, Funny

    ... and that is 20% of the internet's bandwidth no longer available to email spammers, too.

    win-win

    --
    Uh, Linux geek since 1999.
  6. Already a non-starter in Canada by Mashiki · · Score: 5, Informative

    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...
  7. Re:The answer is - Never by Hatta · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Netflix is not Bittorent and has a well defined source which is a commercial entity. So the ISP knows after who it needs to go.

    Netflix already pays its ISPs. There's no one for anyone to "go after".

    --
    Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
  8. Comment on the statistics by twoallbeefpatties · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.
  9. Will Ford Destroy the highway system? by Mikey48 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Your intrepid reported, reporting from 1910...

    Many people are reporting the growing difficulty of navigating their horses and buggies through the town streets due to the growing presence of noisy and fast moving motor cars made by Henry Ford. Predictions are that because of this obnoxious growth in motor cards that our highways will become completely unusable within 10 years!

  10. Re:How does never work for you by Guspaz · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Actually, Sandvine's claims for Canada call into question their American data. Sandvine claims that Netflix accounts for 95% of data in Canada during peak hours, and this only a month after launch with a currently very small customer base. If they're going to claim such ridiculous and provably false figures (several independent ISPs have spoken up saying that, while they have noticed an increase, 95% is a load of crock), how can you trust their US data?