SYDNEY: Netflix getting day-by-day popularity in Australia and since the launch of Netflix the internet traffic has been surged by 5o percent.
Netflix is having a huge impact on Australia’s internet infrastructure, with some claiming it is leading to slower, congested internet speeds during peak evening use periods.
While many telcos don’t publish or release their traffic graphs, non-profit organisation IX Australia — which helps physically connect smaller ISPs with content players — does.
In the past week, public graphs from IX Australia show Friday night at about 10pm was when most of its members’ customers were using Netflix. Member ISPs include Exetel, M2 Telecom and the Australian Academic and Research Network (AARNET), which provides internet connectivity to Australian universities.
Yes, even the uni students and uni staff are making use of Netflix while on campus.
During Friday night, traffic peaked at about 13 gigabits per second. On Sunday it peaked again at about 11Gbps at the same time.
For context, search engine Yahoo peaks at about 0.8Gbps on IX Australia’s network and Microsoft about 2Gbps (although this goes up when software updates are released).
Overall, the increase has seen the traffic IX Australia passes through its network jump 50 per cent – from 30Gbps to 45Gbps in recent days and growing.
Peering traffic exchanged between networks like Netflix and an ISP or an ISP and another ISP for AARNET and M2 has jumped more than 50 per cent since Netflix launched.
Prior to Netflix’s launch, AARNET was typically seeing 1Gbps of peering traffic traverse its network during peak periods. That’s now jumped to 2.5Gbps thanks to Netflix.
For Exetel it has jumped 233 per cent from about 0.6Gbps to around 2Gbps. Meanwhile, M2 has seen peak peering traffic through IX Australia jump from 4Gbps to 8Gbps.
While this is not representative of each network’s entire traffic jumping by the above percentages, it does give an idea of just how popular and bandwidth-intensive Netlfix is.
Meanwhile, Megaport chief Bevan Slattery told Fairfax Media that Netflix traffic was already approaching 100 per cent of its entire traffic. Like IX Australia, Megaport connects telcos and content providers but is a for profit business.
