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Netflix factor has university networks creaking under streaming video strain

28.08.2012
With the return of students to the University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth's campus in the fall, the university's network will be required to cope with a huge increase in demand - and the major culprit, according to network systems manager Richard Pacheco, is Netflix.

FULL SPEED AHEAD:

Even though the school built out its bandwidth capacity recently, Pacheco says last fall saw a massive spike in the amount of data demanded by online video streaming.

"We believe that a lot of it was due to the fact that Netflix kind of changed their pricing model. A lot of students went to streaming-only," he says, adding that between 7 p.m. and 2 a.m., the university's available bandwidth was eaten up completely by Netflix traffic.

While the institution - which has 4,500 residential students - usually sees a minor increase in overall traffic from year to year, the Netflix factor drove last year's usage up to fully 50% higher than the one before.

Another cross to bear for the campus network is the smartphone, Pacheco says.