June Yoon
‘Squid Game’ hit raises stakes for Netflix in broadband battle
SK Broadband, wholly owned by South Korea’s largest mobile carrier SK Telecom, thinks Netflix should pay a congestion charge for hit shows like the streaming service's recently released "Squid Game." The company says the traffic that Netflix generates on its network has surged to 1.2tn bits of data processed per second as of September 2021, the month of Squid Game’s release, a 24-fold increase over three years. It has had to upgrade its network twice to accommodate the traffic surge caused by the show.