Network equipment maker Sandvine published its 'Fall 2010 Global Internet Phenomena Report'. Some of the most important observations in the report were:
• Social networking (such as Facebook) is a quickly growing mobile application. In the US it accounts for 33 percent of traffic.
• Internet connections in North America are active for on average three hours a day; in the Far East, this is 5.5 hours.
• Data consumption over fixed lines is 4GB per month per household in North America and 12GB in Asia.
• Real-time entertainment (streaming or buffering, such as with YouTube) is the fastest growing source of data consumption, both on fixed and mobile networks, and accounted for 43 percent of traffic in North America on fixed networks and 41 percent on mobile networks. Netflix accounts for a large amount of that: over 20 percent of downstream traffic during peak hours of 20:00 to 22:00 hours.
• Peer-to-peer (peercasting, such as PPStream and PPLive) is a growing phenomenon in this category.
• Congestion is least common in the US and most common in Latin America.
While the numbers speak for themselves, we can make two more observations. First about Netflix, with its 20 percent share of traffic - an impressive number that underlines the success of over-the-top video. Not to mention the company, which started with DVD rentals and now offers streaming as well, has 'only' 16.9 million subscribers. Of the total susbcribers, 66 percent use the streaming services.
The development of peercasting is also interesting, as this is an application that requires good upstream speeds. Internet to date has been largely an asymmetric service, but services such as peercasting and video telephony are making a good uplink more and more necessary. This is good news for FTTH providers and reason for cable operators to work on providing better uplink over Docsis 3.0.
And then there's the trend of increasingly using broadband connections for streaming services. Orignially it was all about downloading, whether it was a web page, file, MP3 or video, and then reading/listening/watching the download. In this type of environment network owners can allow themselves a certain level of overbooking. If more and more people start using streaming (in the US Netflix alone accounts for 8 percent of the population), overbooking becomes more of a stretch. Cable networks, which have a shared rather than a dedicated access network, will be the first to feel the consequences of this.
