WATERLOO – Streaming audio and video now accounts for 71% of evening traffic in North American fixed access networks, and is projected to reach 80% by 2020, according to data from Sandvine.
In its latest Global Internet Phenomena Report: Latin America & North America report, Sandvine found that Cloud Storage (Dropbox, iCloud, Google Drive, etc.) has surpassed Filesharing as the largest source of upstream traffic during peak period on North American fixed access networks. BitTorrent now accounts for less than 5% of total daily traffic in the region.
Other highlights from the report include:
– Netflix represented 35.2% of traffic on North America fixed networks. While this was a modest decline from the 37.1% of traffic it represented six months ago, this change is likely the result of improvements by Netflix to better compress their video library. Even with these improvements in streaming efficiency, Netflix’s traffic share on fixed networks in Latin America increased from 6.6% to 8.3%;
– Amazon Video is now the third ranked downstream application (up from eighth a year ago) in North America, accounting for 4.3% of fixed traffic. Sling TV now appears among the top 20 applications on most U.S. networks, but still accounts for less than 1% of traffic;
– The addition of video and voice calling is driving growth in Communications apps on mobile networks in both Latin America and North America. In Latin America, WhatsApp traffic share is now 7.4%, more than triple what it was two years ago;
– Over 60% of mobile traffic in both Latin America and North America is now encrypted and Sandvine predicts some networks will surpass 80% this year.
“Netflix’s decision to optimize their entire video library will yield benefits for both subscribers and operators,” said Sandvine CEO Dave Caputo, in the report’s news release. “Netflix’s optimizations means they can deliver more hours of video using less bandwidth, which results in lower data consumption for subscribers, and decreased capacity-related costs for operators.”
Sandvine’s Global Internet Phenomena Reports are based on a representative cross-section of Sandvine’s data from a selection of its more than 300 customers spanning North America, Europe, Middle East and Africa, Caribbean and Latin America and Asia-Pacific. Data is gathered over a one-month period and is subscriber-anonymous.
