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Netflix takes up 9.5% of upstream traffic on the North American Internet
- film42 12y agoSo if Netflix makes up 9.48% of upstream and 32.39% of downstream, that means for each 10 packets sent, 3 ACK packets are sent back (I know those figures don't represent raw traffic). Does that seem a little odd? I'm not asking as a basis for some conspiracy, I'm more so wondering what that implies for data services I'm working on.
- notatoad 12y agono, it just means that you don't have to upload a whole lot of stuff to become 10% of upstream traffic.
- film42 12y agoIt just seems weird that YouTube is further down that list, yet YouTube is a video hosting service.
- nacs 12y agoYoutube has far shorter videos (5-15 minutes on average), defaults to 480p or less most of the time and the visitor session length is much less than the average Netflix stream. Netflix is doing 720p / 1080p defaults on most players, 1 hour to who-knows-how-long non-stop sessions (I personally have binge-watched like half a season of TV shows in one sitting occasionally) and gets daily recurring traffic from multiple members per household.
- film42 12y agoRight, what I meant though was YouTube let's anyone upload videos. That ingestion must account for a lot more than Netflix's TCP ACKs considering 100 hours of video are uploaded every minute to YouTube [1]. [1] https://www.youtube.com/yt/press/statistics.html https://www.youtube.com/yt/press/statistics.html
- clhodapp 12y agoThat doesn't make sense; There isn't one pool of "upload" data and another of "download" data. Rather, there is one pool of data streaming from edges into the core (upload) and back out again (download). You can either attribute each chunk of data to its uploader or to its downloader, but in either case, the pool is the same size. Edit: or these metrics don't mean what I think they mean, in which case, please tell me!
- notatoad 12y agoFrom my understanding of the source article, these traffic numbers don't count servers. It's just the traffic of residential ISP customers.
- PeterisP 12y agoYour math would be meaningful if the total upstream volume would be the same as downstream volume, which is very much not the case. The percentages mostly depend on how much upstream traffic is (or isn't) generated by other sources.
- film42 12y agoTrue, and I noted that, but it does represent a ratio which can be used to compare against other sites on that list, like YouTube.
- revelation 12y agoAll this statistic tells you is that upstream bandwidth is ridiculously constrained compared to downstream bandwidth, when TCP ACKs can fill it up to that degree. Asymmetric bandwidth isn't particularly high on the list of priorities when it comes to the terrible state of the ISP industry in America. It's just "one more thing".
- reitzensteinm 12y agoNo, all this tells you is that there's not much upstream traffic in general. The amount of traffic could be constrained by available bandwidth, or it could be vastly overprovisioned and there's just no demand for it.
- cperciva 12y agoFrom the article: the newest report has Netflix at 9.48 percent of upstream and 34.89 percent of downstream [...] The average Internet subscribing household in North America uploaded 7.6GB of data per month in Sandvine's report in the first half of this year, increasing to 8.5GB in the latest report, a boost of 11.8 percent. The average household's monthly downloads increased from 43.8GB to 48.9GB, a boost of 11.6 percent. So the average "Internet subscribing household in North America" downloads 48.9GB * 34.89% = 17.1 GB from Netflix, and uploads 8.5GB * 9.48% = 0.8 GB. If the upstream is all 40 byte ACKs, that's one ACK per 850 bytes downloaded, which is a bit more ACKing than I expected, but not completely unreasonable.
- redbeard0x0a 12y agoDon't forget the retransmissions due to the under-provisioned links to Level3 networks by some companies who are currently (or have in the past) extorted money out of Netflix.
- josu 12y agoI'm sure you are aware of this, but the average here seems missleading. The median household has never Torrented anything, therefore I think that the median would be more representative of the average user's habits.
- nightpool 12y agoyeah but by averaging the upload and averaging the download and just finding the ratio of the two he's not really substantially affecting his argument vs. using the median, right?
- gnopgnip 12y agoThe median would be much lower than the average.
- waps 12y agoMaybe people should listen to statistician's main lament about number in the press : Will you please start including the standard deviation ? Would contain a lot more information than just having mean and median.
- sgrove 12y agoAnyone know what the equivalent upstream/downstream stats would be for all of cable/traditional tv companies? Most of these articles show how large Netflix is now - I'm curious how large they'll get.
- smw 12y ago"Traditional" cable, even digital cable, is broadcast, not streamed. There are no acks to be sent, a consumer endpoint just tunes to a channel and reads transport stream [1] video off the wire. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MPEG_transport_stream http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MPEG_transport_stream
- toast0 12y agoWith switched video [1], there is some upstream, as the set-top box requests a channel, and may need to send some sort of heartbeat. For video on demand, there's some amount of upstream for program selection and control as well. But that should be extremely low bandwidth, just control information, not acks for content (although, sending quality feedback to the headend could be very useful to solve delivery issues before customers notice) [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Switched_video http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Switched_video
- ams6110 12y agoWhy does Netflix use TCP for streaming instead of UDP? A few missing packets isn't going to meaningfully impact a video stream.
- ForHackernews 12y agoMaybe because it allows them to adjust the quality they're feeding you dynamically based on your bandwidth?
- lttlrck 12y agoEvery site streaming HTML5 video is using TCP including YouTube. Traffic engineering appears to have reduced the argument for UDP for media in recent years, which is a good thing!
- cjensen 12y agoTCP deals with congestion and bandwidth allocation automatically. Decades of algorithms work in your favor if you use TCP. A single missing packet will seriously mess up your video stream. Remember that long sequences of movie pictures are sent as a single whole image plus delta instructions to generate the rest of the images. A single bad packet can screw up a second of video.
- rustyconover 12y agoDepending on the rate of keyframes in the stream, it could be from anywhere from 3 to 10 seconds. And if the GOP[1] is even larger it could be longer. [1] - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Group_of_pictures http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Group_of_pictures
- rustyconover 12y agoA few missing packets may not matter, you're right. MPEG has a lot of error checking and error handling built into the transport stream layer. But I think the bigger reason Netflix uses TCP is because TCP has a much easier time with NAT traversal and not needing port forwarding. By looking and acting like normal web traffic it makes it easier to guarantee that things will just work rather than need any special accommodation.
- gdne 12y agoWhat this says to me is that people really love content with no ads and are willing to pay for it.
- GFischer 12y agoNetflix really hits a sweet spot pricing-wise too. I dread the time when they become cable-ified and start adding different tiers (but it would make good economic sense). I've been told Cable TV didn't have ads at the beginning.
- chimeracoder 12y ago> I dread the time when they become cable-ified and start adding different tiers (but it would make good economic sense). Netflix themselves have said many times that this is antithetical to their business model - they want to have a single price for streaming. They may end up being forced to do this by the cable companies, but this is certainly not their goal if they have their way.
- doctorshady 12y agoNeither did Youtube.
- nols 12y agoI think everyone knew that Youtube would have to add ads eventually to monetize. Cable was originally an ad-free subscription.
- drawkbox 12y agoNetflix doesn't take it up, paying broadband customers are all requesting individual content that happens to be at Netflix due to the customer benefits. Netflix just has some files on a server and streams content. Netflix isn't broadcasting but customers are pulling that content. The consumers/customers of Netflix take up 9.5% upstream, granted improvements can probably be made in their software. There is a disparity how online entities are seen as bad due to taking too much interest from customers where TV numbers don't include bandwidth usage over broadband or spectrum usage and having x number of viewers is seen as good. This just means Netflix is a popular and big channel or land of content that people spend lots of time in as paying broadband customers using their bandwidth and content customers paying Netflix for access to content. So this can't really be used to justify broadband companies lobbying. There does need to be improvements to broadcasting on the web which was explored with multicast and maybe SCTP will be more interesting soon as that could help with the TCP problems.
- baddox 12y ago> Netflix doesn't take it up, paying broadband customers are all requesting individual content that happens to be at Netflix due to the customer benefits. Consider that "Netflix" can refer not only to the company (the interpretation you're using), but also to the service itself.
- PeterisP 12y agoThe article lists the reason for the increase but stops short of putting 2+2 together. The #1 source of upstream traffic - Bittorrent - has significantly decreased their peak-hour upstream (shifting it to other hours) as described in the article. This rather obviously means that you can go from 7.7% to 9.5% share without any significant changes to Netflix as such, simply because the total peak-hour upstream rate is now slightly lower.
- achille 12y agoCould this be a plan for Netflix to even out the upstream & downstream traffic? Upstream traffic is significantly more expensive for ISPs to absorb (esp at the last mile). ISPs are demanding payment because they claim they're absorbing more traffic than they're sending back [1]. Netflix could just update their client to saturate upstream traffic while maintaining downstream traffic. From the article: "But for some reason, its share of uploads went up substantially in the latest measurement while downloads remained level." [1] - http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/07/how-comcast-became-a-powerful-and-controversial-part-of-the-internet-backbone/3/ http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/07/how-co... Tier 1 networks have generally exchanged traffic with each other without payment if they send and receive roughly equal amounts of data. Schaeffer has claimed it's impossible for Comcast to be "in balance" with any other network because its own Internet service is designed for consumers to download far more than they upload
- wmf 12y agoCould this be a plan for Netflix to even out the upstream traffic & downstream traffic? No, because that would not help them. A lot of ISPs are demanding payment because they claim they're absorbing more traffic than they're sending back. This is just a misdirection tactic from ISPs who have no intention of offering free peering to Netflix under any circumstances. Backbone peering agreements are irrelevant since neither Netflix nor broadband ISPs are backbones.
- sriram_sun 12y agoCan't Netflix acquire Level 3 and solve their issues with ISPs?
- wmf 12y agoI don't see how that would solve anything. Comcast was willing to hurt all Level 3, Cogent, and Tata customers just to extort Netflix. There is no "hack" to solve this problem.
- takeda 12y agoLOL Level 3 is not the problem here. In fact they are on the side of Netflix. The regional ISPs are making big fuss, because until now they were sending about the same amount of traffic to Level3 as they were receiving, which allowed them to not charge each other for the traffic. As now there's more traffic coming from Level3 than goes the other way. As per their agreements would make them pay to Level 3 for the difference. Because of that they prefer to simply throttle incoming traffic from L3, despite the fact that it is the traffic requested by their own users, they also refuse to peer directly with Netflix because Netflix also competes with their services as a cable companies.
- sriram_sun 12y agoI realize that Level3 is on the same side as Netflix. The question was can Netflix play the same game the regional ISPs are playing. Let's assume Netflix acquires Level3. Since Level 3 is the backbone for a large portion of the traffic in this country, some Comcast data would have to go through Level3 to reach their customers right? So if Comcast throttles Netflix traffic, then Level3(now Netflix) just blocks Comcast traffic at the "backbone level". The question is theoretical. I know this is really bad for the end consumer.
- takeda 12y agoYou can't do that. If you are an internet middle man your job is to deliver traffic from one network to another. If you're failing at it then you're failing at your job and quickly someone else will take your place and you get out of business. On top of that there are peering agreements which might also mention against that. What's happening here is that ISPs such as Comcast already purposefully hurt their own consumers by providing sub-par service. No one else would normally care about it but to Netflix that's large number of their own customers and they're willing to bend backwards to be able to stream to them. The problem is that there's really no competition so either we should remove laws and allow once again for competition, provide competition for example by letting cities provide Internet as well or heavy regulation (starting with title 2/common carrier) of existing monopolies, similarly how we do this to other utilities such as electricity/water/gas etc.
- kordless 12y agoThe should just deploy instances inside Comcast's network. Much more efficient.
- wmf 12y agoThey offered that and Comcast refused.
- kordless 12y agoWell, they should do it so they don't have to ask.
- robkix 12y agoHow, exactly, would they deploy their gear inside of Comcast data centers without Comcast approving it?
- kordless 12y agoNetwork, not datacenters. Using this: https://github.com/stackmonkey/utter-va/#welcome-to-utterio-and-stackmonkey https://github.com/stackmonkey/utter-va/#welcome-to-utterio-.... Pool is running here: https://www.stackmonkey.com/ https://www.stackmonkey.com/. It'll be a bit before we can enable significant deployments inside their network, but it will happen eventually.
- wmf 12y agoIt probably would have been clearer if you just said P2P. Considering Comcast's low upstream bandwidth, I don't think P2P is worthwhile. And of course Comcast would find a way to thwart it. http://www1.icsi.berkeley.edu/~nweaver/papers/2009-tprc-caches.pdf http://www1.icsi.berkeley.edu/~nweaver/papers/2009-tprc-cach...