Netflix Slurps 32% Of Peak Internet Bandwidth

Netflix may be losing subscribers and trying to decide on renting games to its customers, but the service still consumes a ton of bandwidth on the internet. A new report that was published recently called the 2011 Sandvine Internet Phenomena Report found that the streaming video service gobbles up a full 32% of the peak internet bandwidth. That is a lot of bandwidth despite losing 800,000 subscribers.

Other than Netflix, the top four largest internet services in North America combined account for 64.4% of all network traffic online. Those services include Netflix, HTTP, YouTube, and BitTorrent. VentureBeat reports that the video streaming service portion of Netflix alone consumes 28% of all bandwidth used across the US.

Along with some details on the bandwidth consumed by Netflix also comes the note that internet traffic is rapidly shifting from desktop devices like PCs to web connected devices like the set top box, game consoles, smartphones, and tablets. Today only 45% of internet traffic is delivered via fix networks to notebooks and desktops. The rest of the traffic is from mobile devices over wireless networks.

[via VentureBeat]