NetFlix is Eating Your Network Bandwidth

If you provide internet connectivity for your company, it is likely that up to 40% or more of your workhour bandwidth is now dedicated to NetFlix. The next 15% goes to Facebook and Twitter and the rest might have something tangentially to your company’s business. I’m seeing this everywhere. This past week, I showed statistics to a customer that showed dozens of internal employees who did nothing EXCEPT watch netflix videos all day long. CNET confirms the trend I suspected I was seeing the past few months.

From CNET here:

Simply put, Netflix owns the Internet in the United States–or at least it seems it soon could. That’s the word from a report out today from Sandvine (PDF). It finds nearly 30 percent of downstream traffic during peak period originates with the king of movie streaming and red-envelope mailing.

If that stat isn’t staggering enough, consider that only seven months ago, that metric had Netflix with 20 percent of downstream peak data packets, according to an earlier report from Sandvine. I’m no math genius, but my numbers tell me that if that rate of growth were to continue unabated, Netflix would literally swallow the entire Internet by the end of the year, forcing our national economy to focus even more on making money from seasons 1 and 2 of “Glee.”

The bandwidth companies pay to stream netflix to their cubefarms could pay for dozens of full time employees, and preferably, they would get their money’s worth by hiring folks who won’t watch NetFlix all day.