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Sandvine report confirms: video makes bandwidth hogs of us all

Stacey Higginbotham — Tue, 14 May 2013 11:00:47 +0000

The story below was updated on Wednesday May 15 to reflect a correction in the original Sandvine report. Apple manufactured devices consume over 35% of all streaming audio and video on North America fixed access networks.

Despite the love people have for email, Twitter and even Facebook, the real star of the web in terms of sheer traffic is video. And not only is all this real-time video streaming possibly rotting our brains, congesting our broadband networks and threatening our pay TV businesses, it’s driving wholesale changes in how we pay for broadband and the future of television.

A great illustration of these changes comes from Sandvine’s Global Internet Phenomena Report: 1H 2013. Sandvine provides deep packet inspection and networking management tools to wireless and wireline ISPs, which is how it gets some of its data. While, many people already knew that Netflix traffic comprises about a third of the web traffic in the U.S., they might not know that YouTube is gaining rapidly with 17.11 percent of web traffic downloaded on wireline networks, up from 13.8 percent a year ago.

Video makes bandwidth hogs of us all

Few people are immune to the siren song of cat videos or Arrested Development. In fact, it’s changing the profile of what broadband usage looks like to the point where it’s normal to be a bandwidth hog. According to the Sandvine report in North America, the top 1 percent of subscribers who make the heaviest use of the network’s downstream resources account for 10.1 percent of downstream traffic.

However, those top 1 percent of users don’t look too much different from the top 30 percent. At the bottom, the network’s lightest 50 percent of users account for only 6.4 percent of total monthly traffic. In fact it’s those laggards at the bottom we should be worried about. Did they somehow miss Gangnam Style?

The average and median usage on both wireline and wireless networks in North America is on the rise. On wireline networks mean usage was 44.7 GB, a 39 percent year-over-year increase from 32.1 GB. Over the same period, median monthly usage increased at an even by 56.5 percent, jumping from 10.3 GB to 18.2 GB. On mobile networks mean monthly usage increased by 25 percent from 312.8 MB to 390.1 MB. Yet, median usage more than doubled from 25.5MB to 58.7 MB over the past year, driven in part by more people buying smartphones.

And mobile is even bigger than these numbers make it look like (or something like that). One out of every five bits — or 20 percent of the traffic on wireline network is generated by a smartphone or a tablet. And as Wi-Fi expands and is easier to connect too, that number should continue to increase.

Yes, video traffic will always be big, because videos are big

Before people accuse me of being unfair, let me note that sending video is one of the most data heavy options around. A two-hour HD movie file can contain 4GB of data or more, while a book that might also take two hours to read would top out at several megabytes.

The sheer volume of data is one reason video strikes fear into the hearts of both wireless and wireline network operators, while the loss of revenue from pay TV subscriptions keeps wireline providers up at night. Unfortunately for those implementing usage-based billing plans perhaps in hopes of influencing subscribers to keep their pay TV subscriptions, Sandvine shows that real-time entertainment usage goes up on networks with usage-based billing. In fact, the only thing reduced appears to be file-sharing traffic.

The rest of the report is chock full of great data such as this tidbit that confirms North America’s love of Apple products:

So what single home roaming device consumes the most Real-Time Entertainment traffic at over 10percent? It’s the iPad. In fact, Apple devices as a whole play a large role in the consumption of Real-Time Entertainment. If you add up all Apple manufactured devices (which includes iPads, iPhones, iPods, AppleTVs, and Mac computers), they consume over 35% of all streaming audio and video on North America fixed access networks.

There’s also some good data from Europe that shows that the lowered availability of over the top options like Netflix or the BBC’s video player cause the amount of real-time streaming traffic to drop. Additionally the report shows that in Europe file sharing is higher than in North America, something the report’s authors attribute to a lack of access to certain popular content because of geo-blocking.

But taken in its 40-page entirety, the data and case studies show how our love of video is causing both wireline and wireless ISPs to get creative to boost revenue and meet the challenges posed by the demand for video. Just like we said it would.

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Based on network traffic alone, Netflix handily beats Amazon, HBO & Hulu

Janko Roettgers — Wed, 07 Nov 2012 12:00:29 +0000

Netflix may have had a tough time with investors, but it’s still a big hit with consumers, with none of its competitors even coming close to it in terms of usage: That’s one of the key take-aways of Sandvine’s new Global Internet Phenomena Report, which points out that Netflix now accounts for 33 percent of peak residential downstream traffic in North America.

Amazon’s video service on the other hand, which is widely seen as its biggest competitor, only causes 1.75 percent of peak residential downstream traffic. Other competitors fare even worse in Sandvine’s report: The network management company sees Hulu causing 1.38 percent of residential peak downstream traffic, with HBO Go barely registering with 0.52 percent.

The only other video service that continues to make a bump is YouTube: The Google-owned video service now accounts for 30.97 percent of peak mobile downstream traffic as well as 14.8 percent of all peak residential downstream traffic in the North America. And YouTube isn’t just a hit with Americans and Canadians: It’s also responsible for 15.9 percent of all peak residential traffic in the Asia-Pacific region as well as 21.84 percent of all peak residential traffic in Europe.

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Here’s what the Internet looked like on the East Coast during Sandy

Stacey Higginbotham — Wed, 31 Oct 2012 13:44:03 +0000

Sandvine, a company selling deep-packet inspection gear to ISPs, shared a blog post noting that in one East Coast city on the Monday ahead of Sandy’s landfall in New Jersey, Internet traffic was up 114 percent. Sandvine also tracked a more than 150 percent rise in Netflix traffic, which was later confirmed by Netflix. Skype usage in the afternoon was up as well.

The Sandvine post noted that, “No single application was responsible for the surge; usage patterns were, for the most part, similar to what is observed on weekday evenings.” While the uptick in entertainment seems obvious, the results should encourage those worried about whether our networks can handle some problem that forces workers to stay home and attempt to telecommute. Apparently they can, or they can until the power goes out and the floodwaters swamp the telecommunications infrastructure.

Hurricane Sandy photo courtesy of Flickr user NASA Goddard Photo and Video.

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Forget video chat: The front camera on my smartphone is a mirror

Stacey Higginbotham — Sun, 19 Aug 2012 16:00:06 +0000

Here’s one more thing I won’t be needing to stuff in my bag on a night out — a mirror. Thanks to my brand new Galaxy S III with a front-facing camera I’m good to go when I need to apply new lipstick–or more commonly, check to see if I’m sporting a bit of spinach in my teeth. Sure, the camera was supposed to be used for video calling, but so far it’s been more of a grooming aide than a communications tool.

Front-facing cameras on phones are becoming more common in handsets for video conferencing, not that many people appear to be using them for that. The iPhone 4 first sported the front camera in the Apple ecosystem back in June of 2010, while the HTC Evo also in 2010 provided video-calling for Android users. Popular new handsets from companies developing devices for the Android ecosystem are driving up the number of front-facing cameras in the market. The idea was that such cameras would be used for making mobile video calls, but I’m not sure how popular that is.

Skype doesn’t provide data on the number of mobile video calls, and Apple doesn’t break out Facetime stats over mobile devices. In fact, it’s tough to find a company willing to share stats on how much people use video calls on their mobile device. However, I pulled a chart from Sandvine’s global mobile internet report from the first half of 2012 that shows that video calls are a tiny percentage of the overall traffic generated by apps on mobile networks — somewhat surprising given that those apps use more bandwidth than something like checking Facebook.

Perhaps the difficulty in using the carrier’s data network as opposed to Wi-Fi contributes to the lack of users. In my case, it’s a lack of friends who are willing or available to participate in a spontaneous mobile video call, but for whatever reason, video calling hasn’t seemed to catch up with the cameras on their phones just yet.

But even if I don’t make a video call that camera is useful — albeit expensive. My trusty compact can now join my address book, my clip-on flashlight, my paperback and my little note pad in the list of items I no longer need to drag along with me when I’m out on the town. Of course, when the batteries are low, then I may have to choose between adjusting my make up and texting, but perhaps I’ll just use that room I created to bring along an extra battery.

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Watch what Apple’s OS update did to one network’s traffic

Om Malik — Wed, 25 Jul 2012 22:19:35 +0000

Apple fans seem to love Mountain Lion OS X, which launched earlier today. And evidence of that love is found in the sharp spike in download traffic from iTunes and Mac App Store. At 3 pm eastern standard time Sandvine, a company that makes tools to manage and track traffic for network carriers such as phone companies, took a snapshot of the combined iTunes and Mac App Store traffic from a sample of a North American broadband operator. What they found that that throughout the day traffic from to Apple’s servers has been five to six times higher than normal. ”We saw similar spike when Apple’s Lion OS was released last year,” said Dan Deeth analyst with Sandvine.

Sandvine said that the two stores are combined because in addition to the release of OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion, Apple also updated a number of its first-party OS X and iOS apps to support some of Mountain Lion’s new features. They predict that the traffic will hit another peak later today around 7 pm because a lot of folks will come home and download and install the new software updates. Typically iTunes and Mac App Store traffic peaks around 7pm local time, Sandvine said.

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When Facebook goes down, the Internet barely blinks

Stacey Higginbotham — Fri, 01 Jun 2012 16:24:46 +0000

Facebook went down for a few hours last night, causing people to turn to Twitter to complain, quip and mourn. But despite the outsized reactions from the site’s 901 million users, the web itself barely felt the shock of losing the largest social network on the planet.

Facebook’s traffic profile during yesterday’s outage.

A quick check with Sandvine indicated that Facebook’s faltering didn’t lead to any noticeable traffic dip unlike, say, the huge drop off in traffic that occurred worldwide when digital file locker MegaUpload was taken down. The reason is simple. Facebook deals primarily in words and images, as opposed to video. By the end of this year, video traffic will comprise more than half of the global web traffic according to Cisco’s Visual Networking Index that came out this week, so when YouTube or a Netflix has a hiccup, any ripples on the web look more like waves.

No Facebook? The Internet didn’t see a change in traffic.

It also looks like Facebook spent a bit more time down later in the evening, as indicated by data from Apica, a web performance startup. It shows that Facebook struggled over the course of last night into the early morning hours between midnight and 3 a.m. PST.

Apica’s chart showing Facebook’s downtime throughout yesterday evening.

Facebook moves fewer packets even as it managed to connect millions. Sandvine estimates that Facebook is the 11th most popular application on the Internet, accounting for 1.5 percent of total traffic. On mobile sites, the social network is third overall in popularity (behind YouTube and HTTP) accounting for 10 percent of total traffic. It just goes to show that some web giants aren’t actually giants on the web.

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Want to see how close TV and broadband are? Check out this chart.

Stacey Higginbotham — Wed, 25 Apr 2012 14:29:09 +0000

Update: I grabbed most of the information in this story from a fall Sandvine report. This was noted in the story, but today Sandvine issued a new report that offers a snapshot of March 2012 traffic. Today’s report also focuses primarily on mobile, instead of television and data caps. So I am swapping out the main chart because the consumption of video traffic has grown over this time frame but keeping the information, including the pull quote from the fall report. We’ll cover the mobile network implications in a later story.

Congress, along with many in the content industry, are wondering about the fate of television in an Internet Age. I don’t have answers about the future of television, but I did share a list of questions I think people in Congress and even in the industry should be asking about the relationships between ISPs, content companies and web startups. And for those who even doubt that the future of TV involves broadband, I’d like to offer the following chart, from showing that the future is already here. We can’t put this genie back in the bottle.

The chart below is a snapshot of global internet traffic during March of 2012 courtesy of Sandvine, and shows that real-time entertainment (primarily video) traffic is almsot 65 percent of U.S. network traffic, up from 53.6 percent compared to a snapshot taken last September.

Sandvine, a company that makes deep packet inspection gear for service providers (its gear was used by Comcastback when it was caught blocking P2P traffic), put out a snapshot of the traffic flowing across the global Internet in September 2011. Other than the rise of video consumption and the loss of social networking from the top 5 traffic drivers on the download side, the big story was is how to adapt our networks for video usage.

Half of our Internet use is related to video according to Sandvine's fall 2011 data.

Sandvine’s fall report points out one of the problems with video traffic; namely that it can expand to fill the capacity allotted to it. When capacity is scarce, the quality of video drops from HD to SD or is downscaled, but when congestion clears, the video service will start sending more packets to bump up the quality. This is good for consumers, but it can fill a network, and make it hard for operators to deliver a consistent experience for video and on networks where subscribers use a lot of video. Technical solutions such as adaptive bit-rate streaming or buffering content to a hard drive help. But Sandvine concludes that basic monthly usage caps, such as the ones ISPs are implementing, don’t.

From the fall report:

Monthly usage quotas have only a limited impact, if any at all, on peak network demand; however, quotas that differentiate between peak and off-peak might have a larger impact. If users had 200 GB per month to use at peak, but unlimited usage at other times, then they would be more inclined to change their behaviors. As an added benefit, the user would perceive a higher value of service (again, if ‘value’ is directly associated with data consumption) due to increased overall usage, without the network operator incurring additional cost to deliver the off-peak bytes. Higher subscriber value and flat operator costs? Sounds like a classic win-win.

Which then leads back to one of the questions that wasn’t asked yesterday at the Senate hearing on the future of TV. Are caps a worrisome protectionist tool to keep subscribers locked to both broadband and pay TV subscriptions? And if that’s a yes, then what should the FCC, Department of Justice or Congress do about it?

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Netflix tops 800+ devices, tablets overtake PC viewing

Janko Roettgers — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 18:29:11 +0000

Updated. Netflix CEO Reed Hastings talked a lot of about connected and mobile devices during the company’s fourth-quarter earnings call on Wednesday, emphasizing how important tablets, the Apple TV and connected TVs are to the company. He didn’t get into any numbers, but a recent jobs posting reveals Netflix is aggressively expanding its device footprint: “Together with our partners, we’ve shipped over 800 different models of Netflix-enabled devices and are planning to keep this momentum going both domestically and internationally,” the posting reads. A company spokesperson confirmed the number in an email, but added that the number “increases all the time.”

Half a year ago, Netflix was only available on around 450 devices. But it’s not only the number of devices that’s changing; usage patterns are shifting as well. Netflix has traditionally seen most of its device usage on game consoles. Network management specialist Sandvine reported last year that the PS3 alone was responsible for more than 30 percent of all Netflix traffic. On Wednesday’s call, Hastings highlighted a few device categories that didn’t play as much of a role just a year ago.

Asked about the possibility of an Apple-made TV set, he said he doesn’t know what Apple has in store for the TV market. He did, however, emphasize that the existing Apple TV set-top box has been “really successful” for Netflix. Apple sold 1.4 million units of the device in the fourth quarter, which brings the total to 4.2 million units sold. As a frame of reference, Roku has only sold 2.5 million devices so far.

Hastings also talked about the growing importance of tablets, which are especially interesting as a mobile device to Netflix because most people use them via Wi-Fi, so video viewing doesn’t collide with carriers’ data caps. And people are using their iPads, Kindle Fires and Android slates a lot for watching Netflix: “We do see people enjoying a lot more of their viewing on tablets relative to the PC,” Hastings said. That’s significant, because PCs used to account for close to 20 percent of all Netflix traffic just a few months ago.

The last device category highlighted by Hastings was Smart TVs. It looks like consumers are finally connecting their TV sets to the Internet, if only to watch Netflix: “Smart TVs is one of our fastest growing device categories,” Hastings said, adding that the long-term trend for connected TVs is “very positive.”

Update: A Netflix spokesperson sent us the following clarification via email: “Reed did say there was more viewing on tablets relative to pcs, which is true — compared with a year ago. Total viewing on PCs is still higher than tablets but (the) gap is narrowing.”

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The tablet boom: Great for Wi-Fi, but not for carriers

Kevin Fitchard — Tue, 27 Dec 2011 20:29:12 +0000

This time of year, a lot of companies are issuing their “top predictions for 2012,” and most of the trends they forecast are hopelessly obvious: Smartphone sales will skyrocket! or Apple will launch a new iPhone! But Sandvine’s top 5 projections for the new year are always worth a glance; its status as one of the telecom industry’s biggest packet sniffers gives it unique insight into how consumers use their mobile and wireline broadband connections.

This year, Sandvine had a lot of interesting things to say about how tablets will intersect with the wacky world of mobile broadband as well as the continued deterioration of carrier services and the advent of live streamed video. Without further ~~adieu~~ ado, let’s drill into what Sandvine thinks is in store for us in 2012:

Mobile data pooling plans will become popular

Our own Kevin Tofel has been predicting this trend for some time, and Verizon Wireless has confirmed it will launch its first family data plan next year, so this hardly a breathtaking suggestion. But what makes Sandvine’s prediction more interesting is that it posits pooled plans will be the critical first step to luring tablet and other emerging device users onto mobile broadband. That brings us to Sandvine’s next prediction:

95 percent of tablet traffic will be on fixed access networks

That’s a shockingly high number, since tablets are first and foremost mobile computing devices, but as the emergence of new WiFi-only tablets such as the Kindle Fire show, consumers are much less interested than carriers had hoped in the “mobile” half of mobile broadband. Part of the reason is the higher cost of 3G and 4G connected tablets, as well as the higher fees and data caps associated with a mobile connection. But Sandvine said a primary factor is the lack of pooled data options: Consumers simply don’t want to buy separate plans from their tablets and smartphones.

You would think Sandvine’s prediction on the adoption of pooled plans would reverse this trend, but Sandvine thinks most tablet users will continue to look at Wi-Fi rather than expensive mobile broadband services. Consumers may take advantage of these shared data buckets to buy more 3G and 4G tablet and connect them to their operators’ networks, but that doesn’t mean they will use those connections extensively. Consumers may choose to self-police which networks they use to due to the high per-megabyte cost of mobile broadband. A tablet loaded down with video applications can eat through a 2 GB or 5 GB plan in a matter of days, if not hours.

This is good news and bad news for carriers. Pooled plans will encourage more consumers to hook their tablets into their HSPA and LTE networks, but they won’t make money off consumers closely monitoring their data meters. Carriers will get incremental data revenue from tablets, but they won’t suddenly start seeing customers paying $100 a month for data.

The potential for bill shock will increase

Then again, there will be those customers who accidentally spend $100, or even $1,000, in any given month precisely because they aren’t monitoring their data use closely. Tablets can suck down an enormous amount of bandwidth, so as more of those devices make it onto the wireless network, the greater chance more customers are going to complain to their operators about exorbitant bills.

Messaging apps will take a bigger bite of operator revenues

When AT&T removed all remaining tiers in its messaging plans, it practically started begging its customers to look for SMS alternatives. Faced with either committing $20 a month for an unlimited messaging plan or paying the astronomically high rate of 20 cents a message, many consumers have turned to smartphone services like WhatsApp, GroupMe and Beluga, as well as the proprietary platform texting systems iMessage and BlackBerry Messenger. They all use the phone’s data connection rather than the SMS signaling channel, and since a text message uses only the minutest amount of bandwidth, consumers can send thousands of them without making the smallest dent on even the most restrictive data plan.

Operators make bank off of SMS and so any threat to their messaging services is bound to have impact on revenues and profits. That tide has already shifted, according to Sandvine. Its latest study of IP messaging trends in Asia-Pacific markets shows a full 8 percent of consumers in that region are using WhatsApp to bypass operator SMS fees.

Live video will explode

Saying video will be a critical application in 2012 is obvious, but Sandvine believes next year will be the breakout year for live video, seeing it penetrate beyond the broadcast airwaves and cable boxes to Internet-connected TVs, game consoles, smartphones and tablets. Sandvine pointed toward Bell Canada and Rogers, which jointly bought controlling interest in the NBA’s Toronto Raptors and NHL’s Toronto Maple Leafs. The barriers between live sports content and live IP streaming are rapidly deteriorating.

Of course, live streaming places a whole new set of expectations on operators, who can no longer even out the bumps in a stream through extensive buffering. The problem will become particularly acute on mobile networks, which are already cantankerous beasts when it comes to streaming. Solving problems with latency, packet loss and jitter will become all the more crucial.

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YouTube’s top channels rival cable audiences

Janko Roettgers — Wed, 26 Oct 2011 18:36:16 +0000

Thought online video would never match the audience numbers of traditional TV? Think again: The top five channels on YouTube get the same number of average daily viewers as the top five U.S. cable channels, I was told by a YouTube spokesperson this week.

That revelation comes at the same time as a whole bunch of new data from traffic management company Sandvine that shows how YouTube is continuing to be a major contributor to bandwidth usage in North America. Sandvine’s Global Internet Phenomena report shows that YouTube is especially making a big dent in mobile, where it is now responsible for 20 percent of all downstream traffic during peak times.

YouTube videos also make up close to 10 percent of all aggregate fixed-line traffic in North America.

The Sandvine report contains another data nugget that explains some of YouTube’s success: The majority of all real-time entertainment traffic in North America is now consumed on devices that aren’t your traditional desktop or laptop PC. “Game consoles, set-top boxes, smart TVs, tablets, and mobile devices being used within the home combine to receive 55% of all Real-Time Entertainment traffic,” the report states.

YouTube has been working hard on getting users to watch its videos on TV. For example, the site has been bringing its YouTube on TV interface, which was formerly known as YouTube Leanback, to an increasing number of connected devices, knowing that users watch twice as much YouTube content per day when using YouTube on TV as when accessing the site using the traditional desktop experience.

Also worth noting: Sandvine’s real-time entertainment traffic number only include traffic that originated from fixed-line Internet accounts, but that also covers anything you watch on your iPad or mobile phone via Wi-Fi. And mobile has become increasingly important for YouTube: The site recently revealed that mobile devices make up 10 percent of all of the site’s video views.

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