By now you’ve heard the stories: Periscope and Meerkat are the hot apps for live-streaming video. Now that they’re both available for iOS and Android, usage is going to go through the roof. This post isn’t about which app is better. There are plenty of articles all over the web focused on that debate. This post is to let you know that your network is about to get flooded with streaming data.
These apps are experiencing unprecedented adoption rates. Within the first 10 days, Periscope was downloaded by 1 million users. As of the end of May, Meerkat had close to 2 million downloads. And what happens once Snapchat launches its rumored live-streaming service? 60 million people already have Snapchat installed on their devices.
So we know people are using the app. But what about data usage? On average, streaming video consumes 4MB per minute. Watching the videos uses 2.3MB per minute. Multiply that by the users listed above, and that is a massive amount of new data traversing your network.
According to the Mary Meeker 2015 Internet Trends Report, video accounts for 64% of Internet traffic. This is only going to increase as people continue to record and broadcast their lives.
Is your network ready for all of this additional traffic?
This post originally appeared on ExtremeNetworks.com.
