In 2002, when Sandvine published our first Global Internet Phenomena Report, we revealed the groundbreaking news P2P traffic was the dominant source of internet traffic, in a time when many thought it was e-mail and web surfing.  Since then we’ve tracked the rise and fall of different applications and announced the arrival of an on-demand mentality.

Nine years later, after completing another round of comprehensive traffic analysis, we’re back with our Global Internet Phenomena Report: Spring 2011 and are ready to share more insights about how subscriber habits are shaping the make-up of Internet traffic, including how Real-Time Entertainment continues its path towards network dominance and how rumours of P2P Filesharing’s demise have been greatly exaggerated.

Read the rest of this entry »

With Mobile World Congress just past and the International CTIA Wireless show up in a couple of weeks there’s been lots of buzz around the explosion of mobile data. Its left me considering what it is that connects me to life when I’m remote from my home or office; what are the applications I most value on the go? And, what’s the one application that, trapped on an island, I just can’t do without? Well, assuming 911 was available to me the next one on my list would be email. In asking others, I was interested to find a variety of island apps near and dear to people’s hearts. I got everything from “life without YouTube would be unbearable” to “I couldn’t go a week without tweeting”.  I’d like to ask the Better Broadband blog readers…”What’s your island app?”. If you will – click here to respond and I’ll share the results next week in a follow-up post. [Vote for your Island App]

In preparation for the 2010 launch of God of War III, Sony announced the God of War Collection – this is a single Blu-ray disc that includes remastered versions of the series’ first two instalments.  Like many game releases, to help promote sales and spread the word, a game trailer is available for download through the Playstation Network.  The trailer, roughly 2 minutes in length, is available in several resolutions.  The 1080p version checks in around 144 megabytes.

Game trailers are no new development, and are by no means exclusive to Sony.  Similarly, today’s consoles support not only the downloading of add-ons (a Rock Band album can easily be over 100 MB) and entire games, but have also introduced movie streaming through partnerships with Netflix.  Additionally, the built-in web browsers often support popular video formats.  These capabilities mean that a console owner might well use the gaming device to watch YouTube videos, or listen to Internet radio, or prevent a trip to the video rental store, or to replace an existing TV package.

When we think of the Wii, Xbox 360, or PS3, it’s natural to think in terms of “online gaming”; that is, the bidirectional flow of data corresponding to a game being played.  In reality, though, the majority of bytes attributable to these gaming consoles are actually the result of these extra media capabilities.  Also, while much of this media traffic is sensitive buffered video that is consumed on arrival, game or firmware updates are more akin to traditional bulk downloads.

Understanding the use-cases is an important part of understanding Internet subscriber behavior as a whole, and it is this understanding that leads to services packages more closely aligned with subscriber usage patterns.