Blog | Sandvine

What if 5G networks were actually used as a fixed line replacement? Many operators (TMobile and Verizon among them) have announced that they will offer 5G modems for home use to compete with fixed line services with the higher throughput supported by 5G. Is building that network to deliver good QoE different than a normal mobile network?

Next week, Sandvine will release the 2020 Mobile Internet Phenomena Report! This is the 10th year of Sandvine publishing the Phenomena reports, and they are of critical importance to network operators that are struggling to cope with an ever changing mix of traffic - dominated by video, gaming, and social sharing. This year, we are continuing to drill...

The early answer is, not YET — let's see what happens after January when it becomes more widely available.

We knew it would be big. We knew there would be engagement. The only question left is, will it last? Okay, so not so much a spoiler alert as a confirmation of what we expected to happen. Despite some initial hiccups, Disney+ has been climbing the Global Internet Phenomena charts pretty much from Day 1. On a major US cable network, by Thursday, Disney+ was...

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 looking...

Last year, I wrote a blog on the increase in file sharing on networks, and it was a tad controversial. There were a few challenges from various angles on this specific statistic that came from reasonable places. First, there had been a lapse in the Phenomena Reports for almost two years and, second, we were now drawing from a vastly different data set than...

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 on...