WATERLOO, Ont. – Real-time entertainment traffic on the web has more than doubled in a year according to a new report from Waterloo’s Sandvine, a leading provider of intelligent broadband network solutions for cable, DSL, FTTx, fixed wireless and mobile operators
Entitled 2009 Global Broadband Phenomena, it’s based on data from more than 20 cable and DSL service provider networks, totaling 24 million subscribers, spanning five regions worldwide including, North America, Europe, Caribbean and Latin America, Asia-Pacific and the Middle East and Africa.
The 2009 report findings include a dramatic increase in consumer behavior towards real-time “experience now” applications and away from bulk download “experience later” applications.
Compared to last year’s results, real-time entertainment traffic (video and audio streaming, Flash media, peercasting, placeshifting) accounts for 26.6% of total traffic in 2009, up from 12.6% in 2008. Overall, the “experience now” applications (real-time entertainment and real-time communications, such as social networking, VOIP and gaming) continue their domination of peak evening hours, with usage growing substantially from 17.7% in 2008 to 32.8% in 2009.
“We live in a ‘right here right now’ society and that translates into time-sensitive gigabits,” said Dave Caputo, Sandvine president and CEO. “As more and more consumers rely on their Internet connection for on-demand entertainment it is increasingly necessary to protect their quality of experience. A key element for minimizing customer churn and increasing consumer satisfaction will be improving quality of experience, especially in times of congestion when these real-time applications are being utilized the most and are the most sensitive to latency and jitter.”
(Ed note: This is what Sandvine helps with, so while the data is sound, this is a bit of a pitch, too…)
Other key findings include a shift in Internet usage peak-times, from 6 – 11 p.m. in 2008 to 7 -10 p.m. in 2009, down by a full two hours. Sandvine’s global research also finds that one per cent of subscribers account for nearly 25% of total monthly Internet traffic, indicating a vast difference between the average subscriber and heavy users.
“Broadband access has become an indispensible utility and there is a real need to educate consumers on the network demands and bandwidth consumption needs of their favorite applications,” said Caputo in the press release. “More and more often, network providers will start offering transparent billing models based on subscriber usage and personalized tiers. The reality is that all-you-can-eat service plans do not serve either subscribers or broadband service providers in the long term.”
Other findings include:
• North America consumes the most YouTube videos followed closely by the Middle East and Africa;
• Africa use Skype more often than any other region worldwide;
• Bit Torrent is the dominant peer-to-peer file sharing application by numbers of users and total bytes worldwide, however in Caribbean and Latin America, Ares protocol is most popular
• Asia-Pacific subscribers have the largest appetite for real-time entertainment.
The executive summary of the report can be found at www.sandvine.com.
The data was gathered between September 1 and 22, 2009 and captured the bits-per-second, per-protocol and the number of active hosts per protocol on the network in Sandvine’s global Internet traffic report and is completely subscriber-anonymous.
No identifiable information of any kind, including IP addresses were collected during this study, the authors note. Sandvine’s network equipment analyzes data from an application utilization level and is not content aware.
