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Netflix Isn't Swamping the Internet
itwbennett writes "Remember the Sandvine report from earlier this week that said Netflix gobbles up 30% of Internet traffic during peak hours? It needs clarification on a couple of important points, says blogger Kevin Fogarty. First, yes, Netflix traffic spikes during prime time, but only across the last mile. Second, ISPs underestimate what a 'normal' level of Internet use really is. 'When AT&T announced its data caps – 150GB per month for DSL users and 250GB for broadband – it called the data levels generous and said limits would only affect 2 percent of its customers. It turns out Netflix users take up an average of 40GB per month just from streaming media, according to a different Sandvine report (PDF).'"
I download that many Linux iso's in a month.
They must have many datacenters, and deals with ISP to host , or peer directly.
And statistics. Even if it would only affect 2%, that won't be for long. They knew they had to put caps in now, because later it would cause too much backlash. Could it be that the "Internet" could be swamped by digital media? Perhaps, but they could always add more bandwidth. Although then that would hurt their earnings having to invest, much less being able to nickel and dime customers.
I wish companies like All-tel wouldn't have sold out. Though they weren't perfect, they had a lot going on right, and that is why they were successful. On one hand I am glad I am still with them, on the other, the rest of the family was moved to Verizon, eliminating one of the great reasons to join the same network.... But the big boys gobble up anyone that comes close to doing things right, so I don't see any reason to have much hope.
Like a city whose walls are broken down is a man who lacks self-control.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
With one datacenter per square mile?
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
In my humble opinion.
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
So the last mile is the tightest, and contended. And we now know the data caps are a joke. So, still a problem.
Is that bandwidth is being shifted from one medium to another through the same output device.
Instead of me taking up bandwidth for CATV, I'm using HSD instead because I haven't had CATV/SAT in three years. I use Netflix streaming, although I'm not sure how much bandwidth I use except over 3G, because it's better for me than what the other side of the fence offers.
When the cable companies start whining about how much bandwidth Netflix is using what they're really complaining about is their lost revenue on the CATV side.
'When AT&T announced its data caps – 150GB per month for DSL users and 250GB for broadband"
Sorry, I must be missing something. Here, east of the Atlantic, DSL is considered broadband - what is broadband in the US?
This is because Netflix hosts their shit with caching companies. You get people like Akamai that do data hosting. Now they have big data centers that hold lots of data as you'd expect, but they also have cache engines all over the place. They contact ISPs and say "Hey, we'd like to put cache engines in your data center. We'll provide you all the equipment, free of charge, and tell you how to configure it. This will reduce the amount of bandwidth you use."
You can see why ISPs like this and go for it. Of course the other side of it, the reason Akamai does it, is because it reduces their bandwidth usage a lot. Win-win situation.
This happened on campus like 8 years ago. Akamai gave us some cache engines and they got set up on the network. Now anything on them is just stupidly fast. Windows updates just fly down. It also made quite a noticeable dent in off campus bandwidth usage.
I don't think Netflix uses Akamai themselves, but I do know they use a service like it.
"40 gig just from streaming data" with a lowball 150 gig allowance, with recent slashdot articles saying netflix is a large minority of people's traffic... sounds like the ISPs are correct, that 150 gig is generous.
slashdot: where everyone yells sarcastic metaphors to themselves to understand the issue
All BS anyways, my speed on Rogers is great, my Bandwidth sucks. Open more than a few concurrent connections and the wife gets a disco on WoW, legit torrent traffic drops to 0 and I'm forced to reset my Modem and router...and we only get 90Gigs/Month. Used to be you could do anything on the net, now it's molasses.
End of Line.
lol, no one per region, lot less traffic on the back bone, google does this, peering directly etc.
"Last mile" in telecoms reffers to the final connection from communications provider infrastructure to the use. In a big city it may be less than a mile in the countryside it may be significantly more.
Having said that while netflix traffic may not be running accross core internet backbones in signficant quantities I suspect it is going a lot further than the "last mile" connection in many if not most cases.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
Seems like ISPs are pulling somewhat of a bait and switch with their business models. It troubles me that they are more than happy to give out "Unlimited Access" as long as there aren't any high bandwidth applications that are used by the masses. Now, it seems, Netflix is more popular than BitTorrent ever was (mostly because it doesn't leverage copyright infringement) and the ISPs are all too happy to tighten their pricing controls to prevent this.
This proves that the ISPs are either incompetent (because they didn't anticipate this) or outright malicious (because they did). My experience so far with streaming Hulu through my PS3 has been generally positive (save for the PSN outtakes) until a few days ago when I started noticing buffering while trying to watch TV after dinner. I really hope this isn't being caused by my ISP overselling their network - though that's the only reasonable explanation.
Full disclosure: I used to work for a group within Comcast that looked at network traffic to the user. Let's just say I have a really strong dislike of all things Comcast.
With that said, not a chance that the ISPs are not estimating correctly. They aren't estimating. At least at Comcast, they have an incredibly good idea of how much network traffic is going through their system. And they build to a given percentile of busiest time in the entire month.
The only way you can say they are miscalculating what is going across the network is if Sandvine is not properly analyzing network traffic and is associating it with an incorrect network protocol.
Except for ending slavery, the Nazis, communism, & securing American independence, war has never solved anything.
From the article:
Users that stream data through a device other than a PC – an Xbox or other game console, for example – use twice that amount of bandwidth for the same content.
Why would it take more bandwidth to stream the same content? Do they use a different streaming video format or codec for the consoles? The article and the linked pdf makes that statement but do not explain why.
If traffic is "spiking" and causing infrastructure some problems its time to make a better infrastructure. What the traffic actually *is* should be irrelevant.
The original report is about extortion, not about infrastructure. Blame a company flush with cash and charge them for nothing. As long at Netflix is paying their bandwidth provider they need to shut up.
What the hell is competing traffic? As a subscriber you're paying for the access. You paid to have access to Netflix, YouTube, Amazon, Ebay, etc., Now you want people to be billed a second time for something they are already paying for!
Ass-hole.
So a company that sells network control and monitoring software, and who has a dodgy past, says the bandwidth caps are OK.
tomorrow who's gonna fuss
More to the point, they do effectively charge more for people who have the internet access but not the cable TV access. It's called bundling. When you don't do it, you pay more for internet.
If I can just reach out with my words and touch a butthole, just one, it will all be worth it.
I strongly suspect that this whole "Netflix uses all the bandwidth" story was started by some ISP lobbyist somewhere, who wants to charge users more for certain services.
One datacenter per a hexagon two miles in diameter. Assumong that all providers are wireless, so all connections go in a straight line. Happy now?
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
You shouldn't lump all Indians together. The Iroquois nation would never do this, but the Cherokees might.
Because, Cherokee People, Cherokee Tribe. So proud to live. So proud to die.
The specifics of how they work vary per company and they don't release the details, but they aren't a "We only cache some stuff no matter what," item. Some things are precached, near as I can tell, like Windows updates. Since they are very popular makes sense. Other things are on-demand cached. Someone accesses it, they stream it from the data center and it also goes on the cache engine for the ISP as that happens so the next person can get it. Some I think are regional, it chooses to get it ready for certain areas because they want it.
So no, you don't have 100% cache hits, but you don't need to for it to be useful. Same deal with CPU cache. It should be obvious that a CPU with 8M of L3 cache and 8G of system RAM will have plenty of cache misses. Doesn't mean that the cache isn't extremely useful in speeding things up (in fact you find you can get overall performance in the realm of 90-95% of what you'd have if it were all as fast as the cache).
Caching for things like Netflix doesn't eliminate the need for bandwidth from the data center, just reduces it a lot and that's all it needs to do.
Normal, at least in the free market, is a compromise between what retailers are willing to sell and users are willing to pay for. People complain about high gas prices, but it is only recently that, again, users are actually responding to the prices. Likewise, it may seem that $2 for a coke is high, but largely retailers sell quite a bit of product in that way.
In this case, bandwidth retailers are largely setting caps based on price points that are attractive to consumers and still provide them a profitable situation. We can argue whether the profits are excessive, but the situation is what it is. Netflix is a new business model, and some costs may be externalized to third parties that do not directly benefit from the service. I think the point of the report is to illustrate this point, and question Netflix as a viable model. OTOH, 'the internet' like 'the roads' s becoming a public resource in which continuously increasing trafic capacity is considered in the public interest, and the telcos clearly benefit from more consumers buying product in part driven by the desire for high bandwidth streaming media.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
I suspect that is goes through exactly the same backbones, just probably is billed separately because of Netflix is paying for some of peering. I am pretty sure that not even Netflix can pay for physical equipment to be installed in enough phone company's COs, or (especially) in whatever Comcast calls their facilities.
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
In the minds of most people, including most geeks, broadband = really fast Internet, and the cutoff for that changes year to year and person to person.
In reality broadband means, well, broadband, as in a service that is not baseband. So Ethernet, even 10G, is not broadband. However DSL, no matter how slow, is broadband.
Unfortunately, this shit is going to keep happening particularly now that the FCC has an official definition for broadband and it includes a minimum speed. People are going to keep misusing the term until the meaning just changes to "fast internet, where fast is whatever I think it is."
I don't think that is crazy at all. Both the highways and internet are essential for interstate commerce. Maybe the could be more neutral that way and actual "voting by feet" could actually help over reaching ISP policies. The way everything is the market isn't going to solve these problems when so many people can only go to monopolists like Comcast for any sort of modern "broadband".
Netflix' real problem is that they are disrupting (or are potentially disruptive to) some very large, well funded, politically active companies. They're screwed.
You have a three digit slashdot ID and you don't know what "last mile" means?
Did you phish someone's account or something?
:(){
But no one gives a shit about Europe anyway.
DSL is generally quite a bit cheaper than cable/fiber broadband. And the infrastructure may well be more expensive. It seems like it would be- you need a device that physically gloms onto the copper voice pair to inject the data stream, and a crap-load of switches and routers to distribute the data streams to those devices. Where cable/fiber is more easily multiplexed. In theory, all you need to feed a cable system is one fiber from the internet connection to the doodad that feeds the neighborhood. Increasing capacity in one means replacing a fuckload of equipment, in the other, it means getting a higher speed transducer for your fiber to the neighborhood.
I do know what it means. It means, connection to the phone company's CO or other kind of point of presence, that is performed over the media that reaches the user.
For DSL it's up to 3 miles, so on average it is actually close to a mile.
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
I'm happy with my G.Bond ADSL2+ connection which gives me full 48/6 Mbps pretty cheaply. With cable there are always problems with upstream performance and latency. Using DSL I get steady 10 ms round-trip latency (DSLAM).
Consider just YouTube, not even Netflix.
I stream shoutcast stations at 192 kbps on the way to and from work over 3G and watch maybe 3 hours of YouTube a week on my Droid X over 3G, and my utilization is usually close to 5GB.
Expand that to 3+ hours of a 256 kbps stream a day and 3+ hours of 720p YouTube a day, plus my Steam installation which at the moment consumes 195 GB of my hard drive.
Let's ignore the fact that I pirate for a moment, I believe the "future" of homes and telecommunication involves streaming media to televisions, VOIP or similar extended services, and internet radio. Also, mainstream games will all succumb to digital distribution. By adding a data cap rather than, say, a transfer rate cap, there's an artificial wall in the way of progress.
Not everyone has DSL. And if you really knew all this, then why the "one datacenter per square mile" quip? Perhaps they really meant "last two miles", given all the caching that is done with ISPs to minimize traffic on the backbone. The point is that the NSA won't sniffing the any episodes of House.
BTW I didn't mean any offense, I just thought the phishing remark would be snarky.
:(){
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Well, I might have a way, but it only works on a semi spherical planet in a vacuum.
The quality of Netflix video is crap. This 40GB represents about 24.5 hours of Netflixing, which is certainly a totally believable number. That's about one film at Blu-ray rates. Netflix is savvy enough to not totally piss off the average ISP, and as well, they're playing on enough small devices (BD players, game consoles) that they have to be concerned about network thoughput with smaller buffers. In short, their quality isn't getting better any time soon. And no love for more restricted systems like satellite.
-Dave Haynie
They don't buy, they rent from limelight and level3. They used akamai before that as a cdn (and I think might still use it some). Between these 3 the backbone infrastructure is pretty well covered. If they really do make up 30% of peek traffic it is reasonable to imagine that netflix has localized storage of at least the most popular content at most of these nodes, and the fact that limelight specializes in video transfer (even before netflix) makes it even more likely.
Get a web developer
It doesn't matter if it's only saturating the last mile and not the backbone. Why? Because the last mile is what's expensive to fix. There's lots and lots of last miles, but there's only a few egress backbone points. In WAN networking the physical costs of creating infrastructure are what cost a lot of money.
It turns out Netflix users take up an average of 40GB per month just from streaming media
that's not the only thing taking up that much from "streaming" in my home. ;)
If Netflix is 30% of Internet content and an average user uses 40GB of bandwidth for NetFlix, then that users overall bandwidth should be about 134GB a month. I'm not sure how a limit of 150GB to 250GB isn't at least covering average use. It might have been an underestimate that only 2% would be effected, but that also largely depends on what the Netflix usage data looks like in terms of distribution.
AJ Henderson
I'm no lover of Comcast or AT&T, but I think the point about ISPs underestimating normal use is unfair.
It says that Netflix users take up an average of 40GB per month just from streaming media. In my experience, your "average" user isn't doing anything that uses more bandwidth than Netflix. Even with the lower data cap of 150GB, that leaves room for a three-fold increase in streaming bandwidth before you come close to using your allocation, with room left over downlaoding 3 or 4 full-sized games a month. Even with the supposed doubling of that rate for console users (which I doubt), that leaves plenty of room. And Mr. Fogarty needs to check his math, as 80 150*2/3.
Even if console Netflix users were averaging 100GB/mo for streaming, who can use 50GB/mo on email, web surfing, and youtube?
I think the author is overestimating how much bandwidth average users need.
Full disclosure: I am far from an average user. I have Netflix and DirecTV, both of which I use streaming video on. I also download a few DVD-sized images every month, and my wife practically lives on the web in the evenings. And yet according to my Tomato router stats, I've never even hit the halfway mark of my 250GB Comcast cap.
Screw AT&T
What the summary fails to mention is that console Netflix users use even more data per month on average: 80 GB. That doesn't account for other forms of consumption, such as Hulu or downloaded games. There's a chart that shows PS3 users consume the most data of all.
That is almost exactly how it works except that Netflix itself doesn't provide the caching of popular videos. Limelight and Level3 are actually the source of the video data and they will provide the storage and will serve it to the customers. When a customer requests something not in their cache, they'll go the Netflix server to obtain it and then serve that to the requestor.. That video will then be cached until such time as it ages out because there are no further requests.
I don't need Friends in hi-def. If I want to see every orc in Return of the King's battle scenes, I'll put the DVD in my queue and wait a couple days for it to show up in mailbox. I'd rather not have hi-def video clogging up the intertubes.
Never let a lack of data get in the way of a good rant.
Netflix's bandwidth used to be about 1/3 of the total US Internet, back when their transmission method was DVDs in the mail. Latency was a bit higher.
So how big is a Netflix movie download? Is it the full 4.7GB that a typical DVD provides, in which case 40 GB would be ~8 movies/month, or a bit more compressed so 20 movies/month?
Hollywood produces about 600 movies/year, so 1 Mbps would easily let you watch all of them, and 3TB could cache all of them at DVD resolution. Bollywood produces about 800. If the broadband carriers are worried about their download costs, they could do their own caching...
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Is that what it means to "square the circle"?
And if you really knew all this, then why the "one datacenter per square mile" quip?
Assume that phone cables are laid in a grid (what is closer to reality than all cables being straight from CO to each user, as there is city layout to consider), you will get one per two square miles.
Perhaps they really meant "last two miles", given all the caching that is done with ISPs to minimize traffic on the backbone. The point is that the NSA won't sniffing the any episodes of House.
1. This is not "last mile", this is providers' network with very much shared bandwidth.
2. Caching doesn't eliminate the need to transfer data over backbones, it merely reduces it. As more content is involved and subscribers become more diverse, it will become more and more expensive to keep large amount of storage everywhere (data centers' space is expensive).
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
No matter what your an american and as such you will be fucked in the ass by the companies you have to do business with.
We are the only place it happens each and every fucking time.
No where else do they even pay for text or incoming calls.
Why would we not get jabbed in the ass to use the internet too.
By now we should have an oc48 in the house.
You'll ever need.
Never say Never.
I have a friend that works the local cabelco (pop 15,000) and assume what he told me is what they are doing nationwide. According to him Netflix is negotiating to set up severs that will host all of the popular content at the ISP, with only funky unpopular stuff hosted at Netflix. this way Netflix gets the customers without having to worry about the caps, the ISPs don't have to deal with PO'ed customers who hit the caps, everybody wins.
Of course the downside is everyone who doesn't have the $$$ to set up such an arrangement is boned, but if there is one thing this country is for, it is for screwing the little guy in favor of the megacorp. Shame we don't have any choices in it, but that is what happens when the last miles are owned by a few megacorps who don't ever reinvest their profits in infrastructure. While the rest of the world ends up with 100Mbps pipes we get the short bus to the information superhighway. But at least we'll have the latest shitty Hollywood crap delivered for just $8 a month, right?
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
it called the data levels generous and said limits would only affect 2 percent of its customers. It turns out Netflix users take up an average of 40GB per month just from streaming media, according to a different Sandvine report (PDF).
So an Average Netflix user uses 40GB per month "just" for streaming media. However, that's easily the biggest chunk of the average user's usage. I can't imagine the average user is also pulling down another 40GB worth of webpages without streaming media. I would guess that if the average user is doing 40GB of Netflix, they're probably also only doing 10-20GB of everything else. Assuming various things about the distribution, it's not hard to imagine that only 2% of users are pulling down 150GB, which is more than double the average user.
Yes, I know you can get to 150GB if you're legally downloading Linux torrents all day, but remember, we're talking about average people here.
Disagreeing with me does not mean you get to mod me troll.
When AT&T announced its data caps – 150GB per month for DSL users and 250GB for broadband – it called the data levels generous and said limits would only affect 2 percent of its customers. It turns out Netflix users take up an average of 40GB per month just from streaming media, according to a different Sandvine report
So, basically, the thing that is by far the biggest use of bandwidth for most people uses between 16 and 26% of their cap? Based on this it appears AT&T was right--most people won't hit the cap.
Please stop before you embarras yourself any further.
"Last Mile" is an industry term to mean the connection between an ISP and their customers. It's common usage and not a literal expression. Yes, it's different for DSL and cable, but the point of the term is that the network fans out near the leafs and the cross section bandwidth gets very large. Please stop trying to read anything else into it.
True, caching doesn't eliminate long haul bandwidth, but it can lower it by several orders of magnitude, which is sufficient to make it neglegable. Though space in data centers is expensive, data storage gets cheaper, denser, and lower power with time. See 'Moores Law'. Bits get cheaper to store and transmit with time.
As the supply of movies gets more diverse and so does the demand for them, different layers of the caching will bear the burder, but, the same rules still apply--data gets cheaper to store and transmit with time.
"Last Mile" is an industry term to mean the connection between an ISP and their customers. It's common usage and not a literal expression
Yes, I already said that. And it's a stupid name, too, however as I have pointed out, for most it's probably about a mile on average. It's not however a connection between different points of presence, (COs, etc.) that ISPs maintain (sometimes on their own, sometimes by routing through others), or then a connection between two Verizon customers in Los Angeles and New York would be "last mile". The term "last mile" first became prominent when describing a problem of serving customers in areas that are supposedly already covered by ISPs but lack local infrastructure ("last mile") to actually reach those customers with usable DSL or cable connections.
True, caching doesn't eliminate long haul bandwidth, but it can lower it by several orders of magnitude, which is sufficient to make it neglegable. Though space in data centers is expensive, data storage gets cheaper, denser, and lower power with time.
Storage may be getting cheaper, but energy spent on powering that storage and cooling is not, and size of data centers is limited, and power density remains constant over the lifetime of data center. This is why no one can actually fill all those racks with new equipment -- power consumption per unit (of rack height) is still rising. At the same time effectiveness of caching will to go down because "long tail" of relatively unpopular content is getting "fatter" with more diverse users subscribing -- to keep cache efficiency the cache size will have to grow much faster than the total size of content being offered. With video on demand services by Comcast and AT&T already offering most popular current content over separate and incompatible mechanism (but always available to their subscribers), caching becomes less and less efficient for Netflix -- Netflix pretty much exists because of wider range of content that it offers.
See 'Moores Law'. Bits get cheaper to store and transmit with time.
Moore's law has absolutely nothing to do with storage or bandwidth, it's about gate count/speed available for computing.
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
people are cutting cable because they don't want to pay for boring programming http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6peRQV5hFEQ
Your opinion of the sensability of the term changes nothing. That is the term and it has a meaning. Noone asserted that it was a connection between spatially separate 'leaf' nodes, so your point is moot. You're inventing an arguement to support something that wasn't asserted in the first place.
Yes, storage is getting cheaper per unit, lower power per unit, and denser per unit. I can only assume you're not aware of Kryder's Law. Yes, it's not by our man Gordon, but it's the same kind of power law relation. It's inaccurate to say that Moores law has 'absolutely nothing to do with ...' when it describes the same kind of relationship between cost/density/price/power use.
I'd suggest you learn a bit more about statistics before you make the assertions that you have with regards to the growing diversity of Netflix's customer base and the movies they serve to them. For one, research the term erlang and reassess your comments in that light.
Your opinion of the sensability of the term changes nothing.
This is not my opinion, this is how the term was used by everyone except you.
Also "sensability" is not a word in any language.
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.