
Netflix takes up 9.5% of upstream traffic on the North American Internet - nimbs
http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/11/netflix-takes-up-9-5-of-upstream-traffic-on-the-north-american-internet/
======
drawkbox
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.

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
> 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.

------
gdne
What this says to me is that people really love content with no ads and are
willing to pay for it.

~~~
GFischer
Netflix 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.

~~~
doctorshady
Neither did Youtube.

~~~
nols
I think everyone knew that Youtube would have to add ads eventually to
monetize. Cable was originally an ad-free subscription.

------
cperciva
From 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.

~~~
josu
I'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
yeah 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
The median would be much lower than the average.

------
PeterisP
The 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.

------
revelation
All 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
No, 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.

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ams6110
Why does Netflix use TCP for streaming instead of UDP? A few missing packets
isn't going to meaningfully impact a video stream.

~~~
cjensen
TCP 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
Depending 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)

------
achille
Could 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-
co...](http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/07/how-comcast-
became-a-powerful-and-controversial-part-of-the-internet-backbone/3/) _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
_Could 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.

------
film42
So 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
no, it just means that you don't have to upload a whole lot of stuff to become
10% of upstream traffic.

~~~
clhodapp
That 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
From my understanding of the source article, these traffic numbers don't count
servers. It's just the traffic of residential ISP customers.

------
sgrove
Anyone 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
"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
With 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)

------
kordless
The should just deploy instances inside Comcast's network. Much more
efficient.

~~~
wmf
They offered that and Comcast refused.

~~~
kordless
Well, they should do it so they don't have to ask.

~~~
robkix
How, exactly, would they deploy their gear inside of Comcast data centers
without Comcast approving it?

~~~
kordless
Network, not datacenters. Using this: [https://github.com/stackmonkey/utter-
va/#welcome-to-utterio-...](https://github.com/stackmonkey/utter-va/#welcome-
to-utterio-and-stackmonkey). 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
It 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-
cach...](http://www1.icsi.berkeley.edu/~nweaver/papers/2009-tprc-caches.pdf)

------
sriram_sun
Can't Netflix acquire Level 3 and solve their issues with ISPs?

~~~
takeda
LOL 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
I 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
You 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.

