Every six months, the great people over at Sandvine release their Global Internet Phenomenon report, which seeks to make sense of global internet traffic across the different regions of the world, and every six months I learn a lot from just gleaning through it. For instance most of the traffic in the US continues to point to just one website--Netflix, which also explains the drop in bitTorrent traffic in the US (why bother downloading anything when you can stream). However, in Malaysia, where it's difficult (but not impossible) to get a Netflix account, most of the traffic for both upstream and downstream still uses the bitTorrent protocol--which mostly means there's still a lot of illegal downloading going on in these here parts--but you can't blame us, because the alternative isn't legal downloading, it's buying a DVD--if you can find the DVD you want in the first place. You can view the report in it's entirety here, but I just wanted to point out one cool fact.

The average monthly traffic in Asia-Pacific has dropped.

Just 12 months ago the average monthly consumption was 32.2GB, now it's at 22.oGB. That's a significant drop in traffic, that which really boggles the mind. This is the growth region of the world--why is our average monthly consumption of the 'internet' decreasing. Put another way, why are Asians using less internet?

I suspect the average monthly consumption has dropped because of the growth in Asia Pacific, it’s quite counter-intuitive, but as Asia Pacific adds more users to the internet, the newer users in the more rural parts of the region aren’t downloading as much as their urban cousins. Therefore, while the overall traffic flow has increased, the average monthly consumption per account has reduced. It’s all conjecture at this point–but that’s what I think based on just this one data point. It makes sense to me, as a lot of people aren’t torrent-crazy-downloaders, which just means that they aren’t consuming anywhere near the full amount.

The Median monthly consumption is just 8.8GB, while the Mean monthly consumption was 22.0GB, and that tells me that the data is skewed–highly skewed. The statistician inside me is just crying to get out and shout–SKEWED!!

Skewed is just another way of saying that the distribution of internet consumption is un-evenly distributed across–or in more laymens terms–a few internet users are using the vast majority of the bandwidth.