The success of South Korean drama The Squid Game prompted a local broadband provider to take legal action to force producer, Netflix, to pay for the huge growth in network traffic. This is the latest hot spot in the debate over who should bear the burden of the escalating data costs brought on by the global streaming boom.
The popular Netflix series “The Squid Game” from South Korea has become a worldwide hit. Developers have turned pre-digital kids’ games like Red Light Green Light into deadly challenges. The playground, in which players stop and run on command, is one of six children’s death games featured in a bloody thriller named after the South Korean version of the game played using a board drawn in the 1970s and 1980s. sand. …
Shortly after its premiere on September 17, the series became the first Korean product to become the most watched Netflix series in the United States. And streaming shows generate a lot of network traffic.
The demand for Internet bandwidth has grown at an unprecedented level in recent years. The pandemic has exacerbated this trend: working from home has generated a large volume of internet traffic.
“Every terabyte of data consumed above current levels is worth around £ 50 million,” says Mark Allera, CEO of Consumer Business at British Telecom. “In the last year alone, we have recorded four terabytes of additional consumption, and the costs of sustaining this growth are enormous.
The vast majority of daily bandwidth, up to 80%, is taken up by only a few companies such as YouTube, Facebook, Netflix and gaming company Activision Blizzard.
The rules that keep companies like British Telecom from shifting some of the cost to the underlying drivers of capacity growth are so-called rules. net neutrality rules that ensure that all internet traffic is treated the same. Allera says the rules aren’t right for the streaming era.
“ Many of the principles of net neutrality are extremely valuable, we are not trying to retain or marginalize players, but we need to be more effective in coordinating the demand for streaming. When these rules were created 25 years ago, no one thought that four or five companies would be responsible for 80 percent. traffic on the global Internet. They do not contribute in any way to the services provided to them; “This is wrong,” says Allera.
Proponents of net neutrality fear that any change in its core principles could lead ISPs to end up blocking or slowing down certain services, as well as speeding up others who pay commissions, which in turn will affect consumers. …
Streaming companies claim that they are actually paying to deliver their content through technical systems that drastically cut the costs of ISPs. Netflix has a worldwide network of proprietary servers that deliver “Squid Game” or “Bridgerton” to the Internet equivalent to the ISP’s threshold. The streaming giant is said to be paying billions in “transit fees”.
The boom in data consumption and the associated need to manage and pay for bandwidth will grow at a breakneck pace. In 2011, the average household consumed 17 GB of internet data a month, according to the Communications Chambers consulting group. Until last year, this figure averaged 429 GB. In November, Disney said it expects a “dizzying” demand for video content. In the next two years, it will increase tenfold.