P2P traffic steadily dropping

Has halved over the past 2 years

P2P traffic steadily dropping View more images

14 October 2009 12:15 GMT / By Duncan Geere

A report from a network management firm called Arbor Networks has said that peer-to-peer traffic on the Web is falling rapidly. The company, which is used by more than 70% of the world's top ISPs, says that streaming video is replacing it, along with downloads from sites like RapidShare and MegaUpload.

"Globally P2P is declining and it is declining quickly", said Arbor Networks' chief scientist, Craig Labovitz. The data to support the report comes from 110 different ISPs, on nearly 3000 routers, for a total of 264 exabytes of traffic. An exabyte is 1024 petabytes, or approximately five times the amount of data contained in every bit of printed material in the world.

P2P now accounts for about 18% of all traffic on the Web (when you look at packets). In 2007, P2P peaked at about 40% of all web traffic. Services like YouTube, Spotify, iPlayer, Hulu and Netflix now all allow legal access to the same content, in many cases significantly more easily than a P2P download.

For years, commentators predicted that it'd be the growth of legitimate services that would bring an end to piracy, rather than legislation and lawsuits from content providers. This data seems to support that conclusion, though correlation is not causation, so it's difficult to say whether that's true or not - more studies will be required.

Spotify has conducted a survey that says that 80% of its users fileshare less after signing up, but we'd be interested in hearing your experiences. Have you found yourself illegally downloading less in the last few years?

 

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Comments

  • Surly a significant number of bit torrent clients now include some form of anonymizing function (possibly about the same ratio as this survey sees a fall) that changes the port numbers away from the standard ones to avoid ISP traffic filtering that reduces transfer speeds. The ISP filtering & traffic shaping of the last few years will have pushed people towards clients that support these features as they will supply much higher transfer speed; which is what the average user probably wants from a P2P Client.

    I am sure I have seen seen some that will even encrypt part of their traffic in a trivial way to make it harder to sniff out P2P packets from other non-standard traffic ones; so even data that identifies P2P Traffic on other ports would represent a lower % of the total P2P traffic than a few years ago.     Posted by Tom Thorne , England

  • I like your thoughts. Can you send me a link to your other posts?


    Justin Davis
    Disclaimer: Author does not represent any legal position of
    Lightspeed Systems Inc. and is the author's opinion only, and
    Lightspeed only provides an internet filter to K-12 schools and institutions




     Posted by Justin Davis, http://www.lightspeedsystems.com

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