Sandvine has released its Global Internet Phenomena Report: Spring 2011, including Internet trends from North America, Latin America and Europe, with specific spotlights on events such as Netflix adoption. Overall insights since the last report in the fall of 2010, reveal a growing appetite for on-demand applications that will continue to drive data consumption and network quality requirements.

Major findings from the report include:

– In North America, Netflix is now 29.7 per cent of peak downstream traffic and has become the largest source of Internet traffic overall. Currently, Real-Time Entertainment applications consume 49.2 per cent of peak aggregate traffic, up from 29.5 per cent in 2009 – a 60 per cent increase. Sandvine forecasts that the Real-Time Entertainment category will represent 55-60 per cent of peak aggregate traffic by the end of 2011.

– In Latin America, Social Networking (overwhelmingly Facebook) is a bigger source of traffic than YouTube, representing almost 14 per cent of network traffic. Real-Time Entertainment represents 27.5 per cent of peak aggregate traffic, still the largest contributor of traffic in that region.

– In Europe, Real-Time Entertainment continues a steady climb, rising to 33.2 per cent of peak aggregate traffic, up from 31.9 per cent last fall [see figure 6]. BitTorrent, a peer-to-peer (P2P) file sharing protocol, is the largest single component of both upstream (59.7 per cent) and downstream (21.6 per cent) Internet traffic during peak periods. In the UK, BBC’s iPlayer is 6.6 per cent of peak downstream traffic, reflecting the demand for localised content in many markets. Overall, individual subscribers in Europe consume twice the amount of data as North Americans.

Categories: Articles, Broadband, Research