[Infowarrior] - BitTorrent Continues to Dominate Internet Traffic

[Richard Forno]

BitTorrent Continues to Dominate Internet Traffic
Written by Ernesto on September 01, 2007
http://torrentfreak.com/bittorrent-dominates-internet-traffic-070901/

A recent analysis of the latest P2P trends wordwide shows that BitTorrent is
still the most popular filesharing protocol. BitTorrent traffic is still on
the rise and responsible for 50-75% of all P2P traffic and roughly 40% of
all Internet traffic.

BitTorrent Continues to Dominate Internet TrafficP2P traffic stats always
cause quite a bit of controversy. In 2004 several respectable sources were
reporting that BitTorrent was responsible for 35% of all internet traffic.
This was probably a huge overestimation at the time, today this figure
sounds more realistic.

Ipoque reports in a preview of their 2007 P2P survey that BitTorrent is
generating between 50-75% of all P2P traffic. P2P traffic is responsible for
50%-90% of all Internet traffic which means that BitTorrent traffic is
generating somewhere between 25% and 65% of all Internet traffic.

However, there is quite a bit of regional variance in the use of P2P
applications according to Ipoque: ³eDonkey exhibits a regionally varying
popularity with shares between 5-50% of all P2P. In certain regions, other
protocols have gained a significant importance. In the Baltic States, for
instance, DirectConnect has a proportion of about 30% of all P2P traffic²

Ipoque reports that all P2P traffic is still growing. Joost is not yet
posing a threat to ISPs, but media streaming services and VoIP applications
show significant growth. For example, Ipoque reports that Skype generates up
to 2% of the overall traffic in certain networks.

It is probably good to know that this Internet traffic research is often
conducted by companies that offer broadband management and optimization
solutions. It is in their best interest to overestimate these figures
because they design the traffic shaping applications that help ISPs to
manage their precious bandwidth.

The 2007 P2P survey will be presented at Technology Review¹s Emerging
Technologies Conference at MIT, more details later.