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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).'"
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.
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.
'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.
Because he partitions his hard drive in 10GB segments and multi-boots every build ever. It's the way of the future.
"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
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.
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.
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
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."
You have a three digit slashdot ID and you don't know what "last mile" means?
Did you phish someone's account or something?
:(){
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).
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
Switch from chubby chasing to the asian stuff, takes up less space.
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.
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.
Actually most of us dual booters use windows to fuck around an d play games and linux to do our work.
Sorry. I had extra food and this troll looked a little hungry.
Why is it so hard to only have politicians for a few years, then have them go away?
Populists are as good at math as they are at running things.
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.
Anorexic amputee midget masterbating (assuming one hand is available)
Smaller file than an anorexic amputee midget gangbang.
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.