Netflix isn't swamping the Internet; ISPs are overstating their congestion problems

[Commentary] A report showing Netflix makes up a third of total Internet traffic is inaccurate enough – or at least the reports about it are inaccurate enough – to show not very many people in either the press or vendor marketing understand the network they base their business on.

There are two important points here, both relevant to people who do IT for a living, not just those who either dislike data caps or do like Netflix:

First, the report didn't say Netflix eats a third of the whole Internet; that assumption was off base enough to prompt Forbes to run a piece trying to correct it, but not quite succeeding. Sandvine – an Ontario-based networking vendor – issued a report estimating that streaming media from Netflix make up 30 percent of downstream traffic during peak times. What Sandvine meant was that Netflix traffic spiked heavily during prime time – when most people are home and watching something other than what's on TV – but only across the last mile. TechCrunch posted some graphics showing what's travelling across the nation's networks during peak times, and in what volumes. Netflix comes out on top, but only with the caveats below. Netflix uses content-distribution services to make sure its content is located close to customers, so when you click Play the file you see is being downloaded from somewhere nearby, not from Netflix' central database. The portion of the network Netflix hogs is only the ISP's edge connections – from a distribution hub to the house of Netflix' subscribers.