Netflix streams account for 20% of bandwidth in US peak hours

20% of internet traffic in the peak hours in the US is accounted for by one service: Netflix Instant. The pay per view movie streaming service makes up half of all streaming media between 8 and 10 p.m. Streaming media, in turn accounts for 43% of ‘net traffic in the evening. These figures emerge from the yearly Sandvine study that looks into global bandwidth use. According to Wired, only 1,8 per cent of Netflix subscribers account for this daily traffic splurge.

Global trends are, reads the Sandvine study, that streaming media are the biggest driver for bandwidth use, while social media are also showing growth, but primarily on mobile data networks.

Streaming is popular in Europe, too. However, web browsing has a 12% lead over streaming as the dominant category in the downstream. As Europe lacks Netflix access, or indeed access to any significant streaming movie portal, we make do with YouTube and Flash, which together account for two thirds of the streaming category and over 20% of total downloaded data.

Peer-2-peer filesharing is the largest upstream and the third downstream category in both Europe and North America.