Canada’s Sandvine, which offers policy management tools for cable and DSL ISPs, has released its half yearly report on what is being carried over the internet.
The most noticeable detail is that Real-Time Entertainment is responsible for over 68% of downstream internet bytes during peak periods, up from 65% six months ago. Smartphones and tablets now account for 20% of total traffic, and this means that home roaming, the voluntary use of user selected WiFi, is sky-rocketing. Apple devices including all types and all functions account for 35% of US fixed line network usage.
But the dominant service in traffic terms in the US remains Netflix which as a single service accounted for 32.3% of downstream traffic during peak periods. The percentage for Netflix went down, while traffic itself rose. This just means that Neflix traffic did not rise as fast as traffic overall. In fact competing pay video services such as Amazon on 1.31% of the traffic and HBO Go on 0.34% saw their relative share decline more than Netflix.
YouTube usage is the biggest riser going from 13.8% of downstream traffic, to over 17.1% in 6 months. This is not put down to YouTube dabbling in longer forms of video, but instead to its dominance on smartphones and the rise in the number of these devices being used.
Piracy as measured by the use of BitTorrent has fallen to under 10% of all traffic on North American fixed access networks, this represents a sharp decline as just 18 months ago it accounted for 18.9% of total daily traffic in North America. Much the same is expected in other regions like Europe, Asia Pacific and Latin America, but it is significantly behind the development of the US. So aggregate BitTorrent usage on fixed lines in Europe is 17.36% but falling, and is still up at 21.66% of traffic in Asia Pacific, but already down to around 10.19% in Latin America.
Now real time entertainment is starting to grow radically on mobile devices
(smartphone and tablets) rising from 9% of all fixed network traffic in North America to 20% of all traffic on North American fixed access networks.
Home Roaming is an enormous contributor to Real-Time Entertainment traffic consumption and as mentioned a cause for its growth, with over 25% of all streaming audio and video bytes being delivered to mobile devices being used in the home through WiFi. The iPad still dominates this activity. The top 1% of mobile subscribers who are the heaviest users of the internet account for 22.6% of total upstream traffic, in the US, while the network’s lightest 50% of users account for only 1.4% of total traffic.
The report forecasts that the vast majority of tablet traffic will not be carried on mobile networks, that video and audio streaming applications will account for over 60% of mobile usage by 2018, with web browsing remaining significant and social networking growing faster than expected.
‘We predict from this data that 2013 will be the year long-form video will make its move onto mobile networks,’ said Dave Caputo, CEO, Sandvine. ‘The home roaming phenomenon, the concept of subscribers voluntarily offloading mobile traffic onto Wi-Fi networks, has continued. This combined with increased consumption of real-time entertainment on mobile networks globally, and the doubling of Netflix traffic on mobile networks in North America, suggests that users are getting comfortable with watching longer form videos on their handheld devices.’
YouTube still accounts for over 20% of mobile downstream traffic in North America, Europe and Latin America, and SMS revenue is being ransacked by WhatsApp with an average of 10 WhatsApp messages per person on most networks.
‘Video continues to be the trend to watch as devices and tablets cater to higher definition content with larger screen sizes enabling the market for longer form video on mobile. World Cup 2014 next June will be the event that shapes the next evolution of streaming video, as we predict it will be the most streamed event to date,’ said Caputo.
Sandvine’s Global Internet Phenomena Reports are based on a representative cross-section of Sandvine’s data from a selection of Sandvine’s 200-plus customers spanning North America, Europe, Middle East and Africa, Caribbean and Latin America and Asia-Pacific.