James Delahunty
4 Sep 2007 6:19
According to a new survey from ipoque, a German traffic management and analysis firm, P2P traffic is responsible for between 50% and 90% of all Internet traffic currently. These are preliminary results and the final survey results will be presented at the Emerging Technology Conference at MIT later this month. Leading the way in traffic consumption unsurprisingly is BitTorrent.
According to the data, BitTorrent has overtaken the eDonkley2000 network as the P2P protocol of choice. During the last year, BitTorrent accounted for between 50% and 75% of all Internet traffic, while eD2K respresented between 5% and 50%. The wide variations in percentage is due to local preference. For example, in some parts of the world eDonkey2000 is still by far the prefered protocol.
However, ipoque's data contradicts figures released by Ellacoya Networks, a company that makes deep packet inspection gear. Ellacoya said in June that P2P is only responsible for 37% of all Internet traffic, compared with 46% for all HTTP traffic. Interestingly, one third of the HTTP traffic was from video sharing sites like YouTube.
Whichever figures are more accurate, both illustrate the increasingly strong demand for video content on the Internet, which has been recognized as a serious problem by Internet service providers around the world, forcing them to look into traffic shaping methods.
Source:
Ars Technica