Netflix is responsible for a big chunk of the world’s Internet traffic. According to Sandvine’s 2018 Global Internet Phenomena Report, the streaming video giant uses about 15 percent of the available bandwidth — the most of any single application. In the United States, Netflix’s bandwidth appetite increases to 19.1% of all traffic, and in the evening, usage spikes as high as 40 percent, in response to the demand for popular Netflix programming.
Bandwith dominance:
The data Sandvine uses to compile its annual list comes from more than 150 global service-provider customers, representing 2.1 billion subscribers, but the report doesn’t include data from China or India.
Netflix’s video encoding is more efficient than that of many other providers. If its compression algorithms were less effective, Netflix would be dominating the available bandwidth even more.
Video makes up more than half of the downstream traffic online, at 57.7% of the total volume, followed by web usage at 17 percent, gaming at 7.8 percent, and social media applications at 5.1 percent.