Netflix launch brings Australia's biggest ever download deluge The arrival of Netflix in Australia has brought with it the largest-ever spike in downloads recorded in Australia. New Australian Bureau of Statistics Internet Activity shows that in the six months to June 2015, Australian users of fixed line broadband collectively downloaded 1,349,975 terabytes of data. The ABS measures …
all these graphs and statistics show is that there has been consistant growth, there's no "massive spike" that occured as a result of netflix. sure it's the highest growth in history, but so was nearly every year piror.
The fact that ISPs/providers are complaining just shows they don't understand how to do basic capacity management. Imagine if you had to walk into your clients as a cloud provider one day and say "Sorry, we are getting close to our storage cap.... but instead of increasing it, we are going to instead charge the companies who's software you are using a "premium" to be allowed on our SAN."
Welcome tou Australian Broadband.
Amazing, it wasn't long ago that the average download use per month across Australia was less than 30GB, but now it's 110GB.
What's even more incredible though, what really makes the mind boggle, is why The Register chose a telephone from the 1960s as the cover image?
Because it accurately reflects the state of broadband for most ISP customers.
Also it's rather advanced since not every place (in Victoria at least) had subscriber dialing until some time into the 80s. In a very small mallee town from 1979-82 our phone had a knob of the front that you turned to get the operator to answer and you told them what number you wanted to call or the town and number you wanted in the case of another manual exchange. The operator was a very nice lady who everyone knew because of the size of the town so you usually had a chat with her before your call went through.
maybe overlooking the presence of unlimited plans for wired broadband and the absence of any change (except downard) in data limits for mobile broadband, hence the lesser growth that i think was being quoted for mobile downloads.
a related oversight i think is the "hi, it's optus. we see you're not on an unlimited plan, so we're going to roll you on to one without you having to do anything or pay any more" factor. the curve seems steeper recently, and i'd be surprised if that kind of stuff had no bearing on the downloads.
My personal experience is that since Netflix launched in Australia my ADSL download speed reduces by about 60% during peak periods (6pm -midnight) every day. I used to get a consistent 9mbps download anytime of the day or night up until early this year. Now, I can still get the 9mbps during the early morning and most of the day, but it drops down to about 3-4 Mbps in the evening. That being said, the Netflix algorithms must be seriously good as I can still stream two different shows at once (on different devices) even at 3mbps.
That is the big question for broadband planning.
My guess is that as junk on the internet replaces junk on broadcast TV, there will be a huge rise, doubling a few more times. Then, as people become saturated with internet video, it will level off.
That sort of thing happens when new technologies are introduced. Such as TV in the 1950s or mobiles in the 2000s. A huge initial increase, which levels off. There is a limit to how many TVs and phones each person can use. (Hopefully) there will be a limit to how much Netflix they can consume.
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