What work from home means for streaming, gaming
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06/04/2020 What work from home means for streaming, gaming
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Technology Streaming
What work from home means for streaming,
gaming
Yolanda Redrup Reporter
Apr 6, 2020 – 12.00pm Saved Share
Lower quality video streams and delayed gaming downloads will be crucial to
keeping the internet functioning optimally while the world stays home during the
coronavirus pandemic, according to the head of one of the world's largest content
delivery networks.
Akamai, which is responsible for delivering more than 30 per cent of the world's
digital content – be it a TV stream from Stan or a video game from Sony – has
recorded a more than 50 per cent jump in traffic volumes globally compared to this
time last year.
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06/04/2020 What work from home means for streaming, gaming
Akamai CEO Dr Tom Leighton has a bird's eye view of internet use and has seen usage lift close to 30 per cent
globally overnight. Paul Jeffers
Tom Leighton, who leads the $25 billion content delivery and cyber security
services player, told The Australian Financial Review some areas of the world,
especially Europe, were struggling to cope with the increase in internet traffic
since the pandemic took hold.
He predicted that usage would continue to increase the longer people were forced
to stay home and believed that telcos had made the right decision in asking Netflix
to reduce streaming quality.
"There's been roughly a year's worth of growth in the internet usage overnight," Dr
Leighton said.
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"There are places where it was already under strain and when you have that sort of
jump all at once it's too much and there's congestion in the core data centres and
clearing points.
"The result is that internet service providers are being asked to scale down, so
rather than having video streamed in HD, the quality will be less. In gaming ... we're
trying to stem the traffic for downloads so they complete at night."
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06/04/2020 What work from home means for streaming, gaming
Gaming updates provide a particular challenge for ISPs and companies like
Akamai because the downloads become available to everyone at the same time and
take away capacity from other tasks and services running simultaneously.
Communications Minister Paul Fletcher is confident the NBN still has capacity for daytime usage to
double. Alex Ellinghausen
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06/04/2020 What work from home means for streaming, gaming
To tackle this during the COVID-19 period Akamai has started slowing game
downloads during the day and moving them to off peak times at night. In some
European countries this has meant downloads go so slowly it's effectively not
worth starting them during the day.
"In gaming, downloading a software update is the equivalent of loading 30,000
webpages," Dr Leighton said.
"While traffic is growing across the board ... video streaming, gaming and software
downloads and social networking are responsible for almost all [of the data
consumption] because it's all such rich content. A movie, even in medium
resolution, uses up about 5 gigabytes an hour."
In March, Communications Minister Paul Fletcher asked Netflix and Stan to reduce
their streaming quality in order to avoid overloading the national broadband
network.
In response, Netflix Australia compressed the bitrate (the rate at which bits are
transferred from one location to another) of its streams, which led to a 25 per cent
fall in the data requirement.
While Netflix and YouTube have their own content delivery technology, most of the
other streaming platforms rely on Akamai.
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Minister insists NBN can handle the working from home surge
Akamai's technology aims to optimise the performance of existing
telecommunications infrastructure and its technology is deployed by telcos in vast
data centres to store and distribute the content.
In Akamai's biggest day for web traffic in March, the company recorded 167
terabytes (1024 gigabytes is the equivalent of one terabyte) of data being used per
second, which was double last year's peak.
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06/04/2020 What work from home means for streaming, gaming
On average, Akamai records internet usage growing by about 30 per cent per year,
but this year it has already recorded an additional 25-30 per cent of data
consumption on top of normal growth rates.
Australian internet usage
There is not total agreement about the impact of COVID-19 on local
telecommunciations demand. Despite Communications Minister Paul Fletcher
saying daytime traffic was up 70 per cent, local start-up Canopus Networks, which
analyses how data is being consumed, said local usage has been relatively
consistent.
Canopus' programmable network switches can combine with artificial intelligence
to classify network traffic in a way that has not been possible before. Its CEO Vijay
Sivaraman said overall data consumption in Australia had stayed the same as the
weeks leading up to corporate Australia working from home, but the makeup of
the traffic has changed.
Between March 9 and 15, video conferencing took up less than 1 per cent of data,
but for the last week of March this jumped to almost 4 per cent. The amount of
data going to speed tests also grew, as did the amount being used for file storage.
There's no smarts in the pipe to say this application is being
greedy and will work just as well with less data.
— Canopus Networks CEO Vijay Sivaraman
The company also recorded a slight drop in the amount of data being consumed by
video streaming in the same timeframe (35.1 per cent to 34 per cent), which it
attributed to Netflix's move to reduce the bitrate of its content.
Netflix also made up a slightly smaller proportion of the video data being
consumed, with the excess flowing to Disney+.
"What we're finding is the overall traffic hasn't substantially changed. It's shifted
from the office to the home ... But what we're seeing is that people's own IT systems
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06/04/2020 What work from home means for streaming, gaming
at home cannot cope with the surge," Mr Sivaraman said.
"We're not seeing bottlenecks in the NBN ... rather what is happening is that
because people will be using video conferencing, which is latent sensitive, and also
trying to download [shows or games] at the same time, the network has an inability
to prioritise tasks."
Mr Sivaraman gave an example of himself, trying to work from home, while getting
frustrated with slower speeds because his son was running a 27Gb download
through the home network at the same time.
"If your kid starts a download, it'll blast away and eat up however many bytes it can
get. It won't matter if you have a premium package or not.
"The better solution is to be smart about how they bytes are used, not just make
them fatter and fatter."
Writing in The Australian Financial Review Minister Fletcher said there was still
enough "head room" remaining in the NBN for daytime usage doubling.
Dr Leighton also said that the last mile (a much debated facet of the NBN) was not
the issue slowing down networks at the moment, rather it was the network "core".
In the near future, Mr Sivaraman intends to extend Canopus Networks' patented
technology to let telcos prioritise time-sensitive data uses like teleconferencing
calls over things like game downloads, which will help parents working from home
while their kids play games and watch Netflix.
"Even though the capacity is there, how it gets shared across applications is not
equal," he said. "At the moment there's no smarts in the pipe to say this application
is being greedy and will work just as well with less data."
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Yolanda Redrup writes on technology from our Melbourne newsroom. Connect
with Yolanda on Twitter. Email Yolanda at yolanda.redrup@afr.com.au
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