MUMBAI: The world’s largest over-the-top (OTT) player, Netflix, makes up 15 per cent of the total downstream volume of traffic across the entire internet, according to The Global Internet Phenomena reports by Sandvine released in October 2018. The reports customer base represents over 150 T1 and T2 global network operators and the solutions touch over 2.1 billion internet subscribers worldwide which does not include significant data from either China or India.
This edition combines fixed and mobile data into a single comprehensive view of internet traffic across all network types.
Video is still dominant with almost 58 per cent of overall downstream traffic, despite operators more aggressively managing video traffic. The reports from previous years highlighted that Netflix, YouTube, Facebook and BitTorrent were the biggest historical traffic sources. All of the applications are still big players, but the internet landscape has significantly diversified; regional variations are showing up throughout this report. A conservative estimate of the data shows that over 50 per cent of the traffic on the internet is encrypted and the adoption of Transport Layer Security (TLS) 1.3 has grown (showing a shift to a more secure protocol than Secure Sockets Layer (SSL).
The global application category traffic share have video streaming, web and gaming on top application type on the internet. As web and video traffic dominate, Netflix is the top video site in the world.
Sandvine CEO Lyn Cantor said, “The foundation of our business model is being ‘the best’ telco network data analytics company with use cases that help our customers understand, optimise and manage subscriber quality of experience (QoE).”
Amazon Prime service has been a huge market success according to the report, and Prime Video has been increasing its footprint not only in the US, but is now available in 200 countries worldwide and is increasing its share of global traffic.
YouTube is at the third position when it comes to global application traffic share and still the dominant video streaming application consumed on mobile. Netflix takes the lead due to sheer volume in fixed networks as well as higher resolution videos being the norm. YouTube benefits from being the most commonly “embedded video on other sites, including Facebook.
Sandvine VP marketing Cam Cullen said, “With the attention of both consumers and network operators focused on network quality, it is more important than ever for operators to understand how their bandwidth is being consumed.”
