Comcast: Internet traffic grew 11% in 2021 over pandemic-driven highs of 2020
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Comcast said internet traffic on its cable modem network grew 11% in 2021 compared to the historic growth year of 2020.
In 2020, the pandemic forced people into lockdown, drove them to online entertainment such as streaming and online games, and made them work or go to school via the internet. As lockdowns lifted somewhat in 2021, it might have been expected that traffic would decline but instead the growth continued, said Elad Nafshi, chief network officer at Comcast Cable, in an interview with GamesBeat. In 2020, network traffic grew 32%.
“We thought that after 2020 growth, we wondered if it can really go any higher. And the answer is, yes, it can by 11%,” Nafshi said. “It’s the amazing nature of the internet that, even with all of this growth and the capacity that we’ve added in 2020. We continue to see significant growth.”
Games constituted about 11% of all downstream traffic, Comcast said. That makes sense as big game downloads often send gigabytes of data to players’ home consoles or PCs. But ongoing gaming operations such as operating online games or uploading livestreams don’t require as much data, Nafshi said. By comparison, video was 71% of traffic.
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He noted that when a new Call of Duty comes out and the patches for updates come out, that leads to the downloading of massive files.
Still, he added, “Video is still the king as video still drives a lot of the downstream consumption. When you think about video, it doesn’t get bigger just when more people watch more video. It is also that the video gets bigger” as more people adopt 4K or even better TVs or mobile devices.
Comcast said
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