LAS VEGAS – As if wireless operators didn’t have enough to worry about on their network already, Sandvine CTO Don Bowman told Cartt.ca he believes: “this is the year where Netflix arrives on mobile,” but added it will make less of an impact in Canada.
In an interview on the show floor in the Sandvine (Waterloo. Ont.) booth at the CTIA show in Las Vegas, Bowman said the results of its most recent Global Internet Phenomena report show that we’ve reached the tipping point for where people are comfortable enough with their wireless data consumption (and the fees they have to pay) to begin watching longer form content on their much-improved mobile devices – and not just in Wi-Fi zones.
“Up until now there has been no material use of feature length video on mobile – for a bunch of reasons. People are on data caps, battery life, screen size… but with a combination of LTE and phone refreshes, it’s getting there,” said Bowman.
Music streaming service (that’s not legally available in Canada) Pandora “led the charge,” he continued. “It has crept up over 10% (of wireless network consumption, in the Sandvine data). In order to get streaming audio to more than 10% of traffic, people are using it as an XM Radio replacement. So, we’re seeing people getting comfortable leaving the radio running for a long period of time, getting comfortable with that data (usage).”
People, of course, are turning their mobile handsets forever into video viewing devices as Sandvine data showed last year over 50% of the traffic on wireless nets is streaming video to customers – nearly all of it from YouTube.
“We know that people are happy with their screen size for entertainment and happy with their battery life and the radio, so we think this is the year for Netflix. Plus, Netflix has doubled in the last six months on the mobile network, going from two to four percent, so it’s not material yet, but that’s the tipping point, we think,” added the CTO.
On wired broadband nets, Netflix is the main driver, accounting for almost a third of peak downstream traffic on fixed networks, according to the Sandvine report.
However, he doesn’t expect a big impact on Canadian wireless carriers as yet. “In Canada the data tariffs are more expensive on mobile and we think that will be a more significant barrier – and with Mobilicity and Public and Wind in some disarray, it might not get better,” Bowman explained.
Sandvine’s Global Internet Phenomena report is a compilation of usage data from its various wired and wireless ISP clients from around the world, however, the clients have to opt in for the data to be crunched and published in the cumulative manner in which Sandvine regularly does it. The reports break data out regionally, but the company can’t publish a Canadian-specific data set because too few of its Canadian clients choose to have its data included in the report, so Sandvine can’t publish trends just for its home country. “We have a good knowledge of Canada, we just can’t release it in the report,” added Bowman.
He did add, however, that Canadians use their internet connections about the same as Americans. “It’s very, very similar to the United States. The main differences are that the adoption of Netflix is a bit lower and the usage of YouTube is a bit higher (in Canada),” he said.
“Definitely there is more downloading in Canada than there is in the United States but both are growing at less than the overall rate of the internet, so as a consequence, their share is shrinking.”
The report says P2P traffic in North American has dropped to less than 10% of network usage.
Sandvine's network policy control solutions are deployed in more than 200 networks in over 85 countries, serving hundreds of millions of data subscribers worldwide, so its data is pretty broad and deep.
