Online Video Streaming Dominates Web Traffic in North America

WATERLOO: Netflix remains the leading downstream application in North America, accounting for 31.6 percent of web traffic on fixed networks, followed by YouTube, which accounts for 18.6 percent, according to the Canadian Internet monitoring firm Sandvine.

Together, the two services account for more than 50 percent of downstream traffic on fixed networks. P2P Filesharing is down in North America as well, now accounting for less than 10 percent of total daily traffic (by comparison, five years ago it accounted for more than 31 percent).

Elsewhere in the world, the average monthly mobile usage in the Asia Pacific now exceeds 1 gigabyte, driven by video, which accounts for 50 percent of peak downstream traffic. This is more than double the 443-megabyte monthly average in North America.

Netflix is also gaining ground in Europe. Less than two years since its launch, the service now accounts for more than 20 percent of downstream traffic on certain fixed networks, in the British Isles. In the U.S., it took Netflix four years to achieve 20 percent of data traffic in the U.S.

Video accounts for less than 6 percent of traffic in mobile networks in Africa, but is expected to grow faster than in any other region before it.

“For the first time ever, peer-to-peer filesharing has fallen below 10 percent of total traffic in North America, which is a stark difference from the 60-percent share it consumed 11 years ago,” said Dave Caputo, the CEO of Sandvine. “Since 2009 on-demand entertainment has consumed more bandwidth than “experience later” applications like peer-to-peer filesharing and we had projected it would inevitably dip below 10 percent of total traffic by 2015. It’s happened much faster. This phenomena, combined with the related rise in video applications like Netflix and YouTube, underscores a big reason why Sandvine’s business has grown beyond traffic management to new service creation.”

“You have to be in Africa to understand Africa. Sandvine now has customers in 20 countries within Africa and we are pleased to include truly representative data on this high-growth market in this year’s report,” said Caputo. “The African market is especially unique, as most users are connecting to the Internet for the first time through mobile devices, and using applications like Skype, Facebook and WhatsApp. In other parts of the world, new users have first connected to the Internet via a fixed line. While video is a small part of mobile bandwidth in the region today, we predict Africa will be the fastest video adopter and operators will respond with creative device-and application-based service tiers.”