Netflix Surpasses BitTorrent as Largest Source of Internet Traffic

Sandvine today announced the release of their Global Internet Phenomena Report: Spring 2011 which finds that Netflix is the largest source of Internet traffic in North America.

Major findings from the report include:

● In North America, Netflix is now 29.7% of peak downstream traffic and has become the largest source of Internet traffic overall. Currently, Real-Time Entertainment applications consume 49.2% of peak aggregate traffic, up from 29.5% in 2009 – a 60% increase. Sandvine forecasts that the Real-Time Entertainment category will represent 55-60% 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% of network traffic [see figure 4]. Real-Time Entertainment represents 27.5% 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% of peak aggregate traffic, up from 31.9% last fall [see figure 6]. BitTorrent, a peer-to-peer (P2P) file sharing protocol, is the largest single component of both upstream (59.7%) and downstream (21.6%) Internet traffic during peak periods. In the UK, BBC's iPlayer is 6.6% of peak downstream traffic, reflecting the demand for localized content in many markets. Overall, individual subscribers in Europe consume twice the amount of data as North Americans.


[via Engadget]