The five largest content providers alone account for half of Internet traffic in France, with Netflix well in the lead. In question, streaming video, which consumes a lot of bandwidth.
Arcepthe French telecommunications regulator – by its full name Regulatory Authority for Electronic Communications, Posts and Press Distribution – has just published its report on the state of the Internet in France at the end of 2021. Unsurprisingly, Netflix remains the service generating the most traffic. On its own, it occupies 20% of the bandwidth, far ahead of Google, second with 11%, Akamai, Facebook and Amazon, which each represent between 8 and 5% of online flows. Together, these five providers represent 51% of traffic on French networks! And the problem does not arise only in France since they occupy 53.7% of global Internet traffic.
The common point between these Internet giants is that they all do streaming video. This is the core business of Netflix, which offers subscription video on demand (SVOD); but Google owns YouTube, Amazon has its SVOD (Prime Video) service, Facebook users share many videos on the social network and Akamai is a company that provides content caching services on the Net. Clearly, it is today the video that occupies most of the bandwidth on the Internet.
Netflix: an increasingly demanding video service
Since its launch in 2014, Netflix has been getting more and more greedy, and it’s not about to stop. Video consumes a lot of data – and therefore speed –, in particular with the democratization of high definition (FUD) and ultra high definition (4K or UHD), especially since image formats such as 8K are starting to appear. To limit its consumption, the platform has been using since the end of 2021 the AV1 codec, an open source format that offers an excellent quality/bitrate ratio with a compression rate 30 to 40% higher on average than VP9 and H.265/HEVC and even 50% higher than H.264, the most popular video codec. more popular for streaming. All while varying the bitrate to adapt it to both the complexity of the video images and the connection speed.
However, these techniques are not enough to slow the increase in Internet traffic. French operators such as Orange, SFR, Bouygues Telecom and Free are complaining about this because the incoming data flow has increased by more than 25% in one year, from 28.4 Tbit/s at the end of 2020 to 35.6 Tbit/s end of 2021, which weighs on their networks. Faced with this problem, operators and the European Commission are considering a tax applied to GAFA (Google, Apple, Facebook and Amazon) and streaming services, in order to help finance and maintain the networks. A legislative project must also be presented at the end of 2022 in Brussels.
Global bandwidth demand is expected to continue to grow over the next few years, with the introduction of new technologies based on artificial intelligence (AI) and virtual reality (VR), which are very data-intensive and therefore bandwidth-intensive passing. Not to mention the proliferation of connected objects, which will invade our daily lives, nor the arrival of autonomous vehicles which will also rely on the Internet, via 5G and other mobile connections. A real technological challenge, which is also accompanied by an ecological problem, digital technology having a strong environmental impact.