Netflix has about 30 million US customers. How much bandwidth do Netflix customers push on any given day? If all 30 million customers watch Netflix at the same time, they would be pushing 90Tbps (1 user = 3Mbps). Of course, only a fraction watch Netflix at the same time. But even at a fraction, Netflix pushes an incredible amount of bandwidth.
Netflix Bandwidth Calcuations
1,000 viewers x 3Mbps = 3Gbps
1,000,000 x 3Mbps = 3,000Gbps (3Tbps)
30,000,000 x 3Mbps = 90Tbps
Traffic Pushed at different percentages
10% of 30M customers viewing Netflix x 90Tbps = 9Tbps
20% of 30M customers viewing Netflix x 90Tbps = 18Tbps
50% of 30M customers viewing Netlflix x 90Tbps = 45Tbps.
Those are some ridiculous numbers. No wonder all the last mile Telco’s are complaining. Even at 10%, we are talking about 9Tbps of bandwidth. That is the reason Netflix built it’s own CDN. The next thing they have to do is build their own WAN in the US. This will take traffic off the public Internet for as long as possible before video delivery to customer.