It seems like not that long ago that Netflix was a weird service Americans had where you got DVDs in the post and now it’s a household name that in itself is almost used as a simile just for the concept of watching TV and movies. Netflix is huge. Really, really huge. Like, unbelievably huge. As in, it is being claimed that Netflix accounts for nearly 15% of worldwide downstream internet traffic.
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According to Sandvine‘s Global Internet Phenomena Report for the first half of 2018, the streaming giant is the single biggest user of downstream bandwidth globally in the app world. Sandvine puts Netflix at 13.1%, followed closely by YouTube at 11.4%, with good old-fashioned web browsing at 7.8%.
Sandvine says that this is somewhat impressive, given that there are quite a few streaming services on the market these days and also given that a lot of mobile data providers will throttle Netflix video down to standard definition.
Sandvine, a networking equipment company founded in Canada in 2001, sources the data for the report from some 2.1 billion internet users, which is not completely insignificant, but they readily admit that they lack data for large portions of the Chinese and Indian markets, which obviously make up a huge part of the global population and also internet traffic.
Congratulations to Mr Netflix.
