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On the surface, everything seems to flow naturally: a 4K movie loads without pauses, a video call maintains the sharpness of gestures, and online games register hardly any latency. But after this apparent fluidity, data traffic grows like a wave that threatens to overwhelm the structures that sustain it. In this scenario, telecommunications operators face a paradox: the more efficient their network, the greater the demand that stresses it. And streaming, ubiquitous and voracious, has become the biggest antagonist of the internet’s smart distribution model.
“Bringing content to the edge”: an old solution with new challenges
By: Gabriel E. Levy B.
For more than a decade, the principle of “bringing content closer to the user” has become a fundamental strategy to face the saturation of networks.
Content delivery networks (CDNs) and local exchange points (IXPs or data hubs) allowed operators to dilute international traffic.
Instead of relying on expensive submarine cables and transcontinental links, the most demanded data began to be hosted within the borders themselves, or at least in nearby regions.
This architecture distributes traffic pressure and significantly decreases operating costs, while improving the user experience.
According to David Clark, one of the architects of the TCP/IP protocol, “the decentralization of content not only accelerates the network, but also changes the economic model of the Internet” (Clark, 2018). Companies such as Akamai, Cloudflare or Google deployed thousands of CDN nodes around the world, in an invisible but vital network that sustains the global traffic of the modern network.
But this solution, designed in another era and for another volume of data, today faces its own limit. What initially worked for websites, short videos, and occasional downloads is now stumbling upon a steady stream of high-definition streams, live streams, and platforms that don’t allow caching.
Streaming, with its real-time demands, sidesteps the benefits of traditional CDNs and forces operators to rethink the balance between infrastructure, cost, and quality.
The global network pushes towards the local
The Internet, although it seems an ethereal and dematerialized space, is deeply physical. Cables, data centers, routers, servers: everything that happens online needs tangible support.
The growth of local networks and the installation of CDNs has been an attempt to tame that physicality. Each country that installs a data HUB becomes a more autonomous node, less dependent on gigantic international links.
In Latin America, for example, initiatives such as the NAP of the Americas in Miami and the PTT (Pontos de Troca de Tráfego) in Brazil managed to transform the map of internet traffic.
According to data from the National Institute of Telecommunications (Inatel), in 2010, more than 80% of Brazil’s internet traffic originated outside the country. In 2023, that figure dropped to 30%.
This means that costs for operators also went down, as they didn’t pay for every bit that traveled over submarine cables to servers in the U.S. or Europe.
The model became so efficient that many carriers began offering more speed for the same price.
However, as Danish researcher Mikkel Flyverbom warns, “the physical internet is full of invisible decisions that affect what we believe to be freedom of connection” (Flyverbom, 2020). Those decisions, often made in remote data centers or by network engineers, also outline what’s possible and what’s not within the digital ecosystem.
But what allowed the exponential growth of users and digital services, also created its own Achilles’ heel. Networks are designed to distribute content en masse, not to respond to each individual, live and unstoreable stream.
Streaming: the elephant in bandwidth
Streaming platforms not only changed cultural habits; They also completely changed the architecture of Internet traffic. Netflix, YouTube, Disney+, Amazon Prime, Twitch and TikTok today account for more than 60% of global data traffic, according to the latest report from Sandvine (2024). More worrying for operators, that traffic is becoming less and less susceptible to optimization.
Unlike static content—a previously uploaded web page or video—live streaming or personalized content makes caching difficult. What does this mean? That cannot be previously stored near the user. Every time someone presses “play,” a single stream of data travels from the origin servers, often in real time.
This behavior erodes the “dilution” strategy that worked so well in the past. CDNs can store the latest season of a hit series, but they can’t provide for a video call, Twitch live stream, or interactive virtual concert.
In addition, streaming platforms do not always collaborate with local operators. In several countries, such as Colombia and Mexico, tensions between telecommunications companies and content providers have increased. Some ISPs claim that content giants use their infrastructure without contributing financially to its maintenance, a debate that is already being waged in the courts of the European Union under the concept of “fair share”.
From the center to the edge: examples of a silent struggle
In South Korea, one of the countries with the best digital infrastructure in the world, internet provider SK Broadband sued Netflix in 2022 over the increase in traffic without compensation. The trigger was the global success of “Squid Game,” whose demand overwhelmed local servers and raised the network’s operating costs. The South Korean justice system granted the claim, opening the door for other countries to imitate the model.
In Germany, Deutsche Telekom negotiated directly with Disney+ and Amazon Prime to install their own CDN servers within their networks, allowing them to reduce international traffic. But not all platforms accept these conditions, which generates inequalities between operators and users.
In Latin America, countries such as Chile and Argentina have deployed networks of Internet Exchange Points (IXPs) with relative success, but they face limitations due to the concentration of traffic in a few content providers. Companies such as Claro or Movistar have tried alliances with local platforms to diversify data sources, but the dominance of the US giants is almost total.
Even in the United States, where the network is vast and diverse, operators face similar challenges. In 2023, Comcast reported that 70% of its traffic spikes were related to live streaming events, such as NFL games or series launches.
In conclusion
The model of dilution of the internet through local networks and CDNs made it possible to democratize access to a faster, more efficient and less expensive network. However, the rise of streaming – with its unpredictable and real-time demands – threatens to collapse the architecture on which this balance was based. The tension between operators and content platforms is not only economic, but structural. It requires new forms of collaboration, regulation and technological innovation. Because in this interconnected network, everything that flows, can also overflow.
References:
- Clark, D. (2018). Designing an Internet. MIT Press.
- Flyverbom, M. (2020). The Digital Prism: Transparency and Managed Visibilities in a Datafied World. Cambridge University Press.
- Sandvine. (2024). Global Internet Phenomena Report.
