Global Internet Phenomena

The 2025 Global Internet Phenomena Report

For over a decade, AppLogic Networks has published the Global Internet Phenomena Report (GIPR) – an annual analysis that provides detailed insights into global internet traffic patterns and the applications driving that traffic. Since 2023, we’ve relied on our own AppLogic product to identify and categorize applications with an unmatched degree of coverage, allowing us to measure application volume, user volume, and popularity across various networks. This data is collected from a representative sample of anonymized and aggregated network traffic across different regions, providing a comprehensive picture of how people use the internet worldwide.

A few things to know about the AppLogic Networks Global Internet Phenomena Report:

We focus on application usage.
We use AI-powered analysis.
We preserve and protect user privacy.
We seek to identify trends.

This year’s report dove deep into a few important trends in internet usage and traffic:

The variable nature of application popularity.
The rise of AI assistants.
The continued pervasiveness of ad analytics.
The ongoing evolution of encryption technologies.
The impact of live streaming events.

The GIPR provides a comprehensive analysis of global internet traffic patterns, identifying which applications are driving the most data usage and offering valuable insights to internet service providers (ISPs) to understand how to best manage network capacity, optimize service quality, and potentially develop new service offerings based on emerging trends in app usage and data consumption.

We provide the GIPR free to the industry because we believe that when ISPs understand how users are consuming internet bandwidth across different applications and platforms, they can optimize their networks to deliver the best possible quality of experience to their customers.

We hope you find this report useful, and we welcome your comments and questions. If you’d like a detailed readout and review, contact us.

And if you’re an AppLogic Networks customer and you’d like to participate in the GIPR, please contact your account representative.

Previous Reports

Sandvine’s 2024 Global Internet Phenomena Report is the most accurate and comprehensive to date, with new data, new visualizations and new insights.

Leveraging AppLogic’s newly enhanced AI-powered visualizations across 14 App Categories and 11 Content Classification Categories, this report transcends previous reporting on volume percentages, digging deeper with daily app volumes per subscriber, as well as application user volumes, and even app popularity percentages.

These granular insights are applied to upstream and downstream traffic across fixed and mobile networks, providing a powerful tool for those in charge of Planning and Engineering, Operations, Customer Care, Marketing, and Product Development.

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The average person can spend up to eight hours a day on internet applications. Whether for work, school, communications, or education, apps have become integral to our way of life. For service providers, this means that the application quality of experience (App QoE) you deliver is inextricably linked to your customers’ satisfaction.

As the App QoE company, Sandvine solutions continuously monitor, detect, and troubleshoot application quality so that service providers can ensure the best possible application experience and resolve network issues before they become customer issues.

Read our latest report on application usage, growth, and trends and see how important applications are to your customers, your network, and your business.

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In this report, we offer a greater understanding about the impact of apps and mashups, multiplexing and new transport and security protocols in order to help service providers plan for future service and capacity growth, and optimize QoE, while also securing networks.

We want service providers to be in the driver’s seat, and we’ve leveraged enriched “application and network intelligence” to dig up the trends that will help them analyze, optimize, and monetize applications to deliver high quality customer experiences.

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This edition is solely focused on mobile data in order to provide a targeted model that mobile operators can draw from to begin their planning process. The Mobile Internet Phenomena Report ranks applications based on their “traffic share.” The fascinating data that fuels the report illustrates the disconnect between “market share” for companies defined by subscriber counts and how often subscribers use a service.

Traffic share is defined as the percentage of network resources used by a specific application relative to other applications.

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The COVID-19 worldwide pandemic has drastically affected network usage around the world, with many operators experiencing 100% growth in traffic volume as usage shifts from enterprise and education networks to primarily consumer broadband networks.

We at Sandvine want to ensure that network operators can continue to deliver high quality internet services that consumers depend on during these times, and this report is our contribution to the network industry during these times of change.

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Some highlights from this edition of the report include:

Streaming video is over 65% of all mobile traffic by volume
YouTube is more than 25% of total worldwide mobile traffic by volume
Facebook Video has grown substantially over the past year to #2 worldwide at over 17% of total traffic volume

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The 2019 Mobile Internet Phenomena Report from Sandvine is here!

Mobile networks have different traffic composition than the what we saw in the 2018 Global Internet Phenomena Report, and this version of the report shows clear differences between a report dominated by fixed traffic volume versus a mobile-only view of internet consumption.

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In 2019, streaming video continues to dominate internet consumption

but the content sources for this video are fragmenting from the convenience of Netflix as the aggregator to many brands with unique original offerings. This has a big effect on overall internet traffic patterns, as it has also resulted in an increase in file sharing as users seek to avoid spending more money on subscriptions.

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This edition of the Global Internet Phenomena Report covers both global macro and regional micro views of the composition of traffic on the internet.

The data in the report is drawn from Sandvine’s installed base of over 150 Tier 1 and Tier 2 fixed and mobile operators worldwide. View our findings for 2018 by downloading the report and watching the related webinar.

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