This is a guest contribution by James Isherwood of Slotsquad.co.uk. If you would like to submit a contribution please contact Bill Beatty for submission details. Thank you.

It was interesting to see on the news recently that a certain data streaming service was consuming 15% of global net bandwidth allocation. As developers, it’s sometimes easy to forget how data transferring mediums and display mediums move along at different paces. Technology in areas such as 4K and other high-resolution formats is advancing at lightning pace, and so is the demand on bandwidth that comes with it.

In iGaming, were players depend on speed, playability, delivery and incredibly optimised resolution, this is something the industry can’t overlook. It’s all to do with pixels and their delivery time, data packets, how the 1’s and 0’s go from A to B and how the servers respond to all those clicks. Of course, the player doesn’t care about any of this, they just want to play games.

In the future, more and more video traffic is going to eat up bandwidth likes it’s an all-day buffet open 24/7. According to a report from Sandvine, video accounts for 58% of the world’s downstream traffic, followed by web browsing (17%), gaming (7.8%) and social media (5.1%). With such a large portion of bandwidth consumed by video streaming, the pressure on networks around the world is huge. This could potentially affect developers, operators and ultimately consumers.