Netflix absolutely dominates on South African fibre networks

Netflix is South Africa’s favourite online service by far, new data from major Internet service provider Vox shows.

The Internet domain where it hosts video content received more than double the hits than YouTube, and it also consumed 50% more bandwidth than Google’s popular streaming service.

Vox recently shared data on the most popular online services and websites among its customers with MyBroadband, revealing that video streaming accounts for the biggest amount of traffic on its fibre network.

The ISP’s information supports previous feedback from other ISPs that video streaming consumed a significant chunk of bandwidth on their fibre-to-the-home (FTTH) networks.

Vox shared several graphs showing Internet usage patterns from their FTTH users in the past month.

This revealed that more than half (54.8%) of all its traffic occurred on streaming protocols.

Web browsing accounted for the next biggest proportion of traffic at 12.6%, software updates with 7.9%, and online gaming at 5.5%.

Peer-to-peer traffic, which includes BitTorrent, took up 3.5%.

Historically, this protocol was a big traffic driver, thanks to the numerous movies and TV shows available through sites like The Pirate Bay.

However, as South Africans increasingly gained access to international video streaming services offering good value for money, BitTorrent usage declined relative to streaming traffic.

Another factor to consider is that some BitTorrent users would use a virtual private network to hide their Internet activity.

Even accounting for this, Netflix and YouTube traffic would still dwarf peer-to-peer downloads.

The graph below shows the most popular categories of protocols in terms of bandwidth on Vox’s FTTH network.

Top protocol categories

Vox also provided a breakdown of the most popular online services and websites by hits and bandwidth.

This clearly illustrated which of the streaming services were the most popular.

Video giant Netflix came out on top in both cases, accounting for 37.9% of the hit distribution and 21.79% of bandwidth.

It was followed by YouTube, with 14.09% of the hits (hosted under the “googlevideo.com” domain) and 14.16% of the bandwidth consumption.

After this, the hits distribution and bandwidth usage deviate slightly.

Akamaized.net ranks third in terms of hit distribution, accounting for 8.47%. Akamai is a content delivery network used by several major organisations ranging from Adobe to League of Legends developer Riot Games.

Microsoft also uses Akamai to distribute its Windows software updates.

Rounding out Vox’s top five domains were Xbox Live and PlayStation, with 5.22% and 4.75% of hits, respectively.

Other streaming services

Looking at bandwidth consumed, the popularity of video streaming services is evident.

The third biggest bandwidth consumer is Facebook Video, followed by DStv and Instagram Video. These were followed by Xbox and PlayStation’s games download platforms.

Another noteworthy observation was that MultiChoice’s video streaming service Showmax accounted for 1.16% of bandwidth consumption. That suggests it has around 20 times less traffic than Netflix.

The tables below compare the top websites and protocols by hits and bandwidth on Vox’s FTTH network.

Top websites by hits

Top protocols by bandwidth

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