Stat of the Day

Netflix Consumes a Third of America's Internet Bandwidth

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Dino Grandoni 1,686 Views Oct 28, 2011

Though the company hemorrhaged some 800,000 customers last quarter after hiking its prices, Netflix still takes up a huge portion of the country's Internet bandwidth. After analyzing 200 service providers in 80 countries, Sandvine, a networking equipment company, concluded in a study that Netflix accounts for "32.7% of peak U.S. downstream traffic," CNN reports. The study sees changes in how Americans use Netflix as a sign of "a post-PC era": today, only 45 percent of traffic volume of entertainment services like Netflix is done though laptops or PCs, with the rest going to other devices, such as video-game consoles, smart TVs, tablets, and cell phones. The report also found, unsurprisingly, video traffic peaks between 9 and 11 p.m., as seen in the chart below.

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