Copyright Law

STUDY: P2P Traffic Down to 15-20% in North America

By soulxtc

Down from 37% back in 2007, and data suggests traffic pattern shows signs of “either persistent congestion or, more likely, evidence of widespread provider manipulation of P2P traffic rates.”

Arbor Networks, which sells subscriber traffic management equipment to ISPs, has released the results of a new study which concludes that P2P traffic is down to roughly 15-20% of all North American traffic.

That’s down substantially from the 37% of all North American traffic P2P reportedly consumed back in 2007.

It took daily average traffic fluctuations of 40 North American consumer & regional ISPs and concluded that not only is P2P traffic down, but that its cyclical inverted traffic pattern suggests “either persistent congestion or, more likely, evidence of widespread provider manipulation of P2P traffic rates.”

Notice in the images below how P2P traffic peaks at 6am and then decreases till around 4pm when HTTP traffic reaches its peak.

See how the two peaks are clearly inverted from one another?

Regardless of whether or not ISPs are manipulating P2P traffic, the important thing to observe here is that file-sharing traffic is only responsible for at most 20% and as low as a mere 8%. With some ISPs clamoring for bandwidth caps, throttling, and other technical measures to adress P2P traffic, it seems as though they’re already doing a fine job of managhing network congestion on their own.

Stay tuned.

jared@zeropaid.com

Full post as published by ZeroPaid on September 14, 2009 (boomark / email).