Blog | Sandvine

Google’s Stadia is hitting our networks in November, and Nvidia’s GeForce Now is imminent as well. What is this cloud gaming stuff, really? 

I got asked a really good question on Friday as I was presenting a preview of the report to a strategic Sandvine customer. In an earlier blog on the percentage of video traffic, I ask: "How much video can we watch?" The question asked during the session was: "Or what if 10% of video suddenly moved to HD?" A follow up to the initial question came shortly...

For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction – and the market success of Netflix has caused a massive pendulum swing in the market. Netflix grew popular as an aggregator of video, essentially giving users the ability to watch a wide variety of content from a single account. Amazon Prime and Hulu followed, and now every content owner is...

In the 2019 Mobile Phenomena Report, TikTok was #11 overall on mobile networks, coming out of nowhere. Normally, mobile-centric applications do not do well in the Global Report, as they get lost in the flood of high bandwidth video and download traffic. TikTok, despite being a mobile-focused application, climbed the charts this year significantly.

When we think about the upstream traffic that dominates the internet in most regions, we see a lot of video traffic consisting of packet acknowledgements and bookmarking of progress in watching videos, as well as messaging traffic. In APAC, cloud traffic consumes more than 50% of all upstream traffic volume, and shows no sign of slowing down.

In the world of eSports, Twitch reigns supreme as the streaming platform of choice. The platform's position in the Global Internet Phenomena Report has grown steadily over the past few years — this year, it is 19th overall (at 1.27%) of overall downstream volume and 28th (at 0.47% of the upstream). It is the 7th most popular video streaming application...

We often talk about the big brands on the internet and their dominance. Last year, I did a spotlight on Asia that showed that Google was over 40% of the connections in Asia, and in the mobile report, Facebook was over 20% of all mobile traffic. I decided to dig through the Phenomena data to discover how the brands' library of applications and content...

The use of encryption on the internet has been growing for years. The majority of that growth has come from the use of SSL/TLS for encrypting web and streaming protocols (which are used for the vast majority of traffic on the internet). But over the past few years, the use of VPN services has begun to steadily rise as more consumers seek to shield their...

Many network administrators cringe when they hear "Patch Tuesday" or "New IOS Update," because they know a flood of traffic will hit their network, bearing a startling resemblance to a large-scale DDoS attack. Well, "Marketplace" (my category designation) traffic was 2.65% of downstream traffic this year, and the biggest component of that traffic is from...

Last year, we reported that we saw an uptick in file sharing for the first time in several years. Since we had changed the way that we do the Global Internet Phenomena Report, specifically from a much larger sample size, it was hard to compare apples to apples to provide hard proof. Well, this year we have it, and a big driver was exactly what you would...