P2P Remains Dominant Protocol

An anonymous reader writes "Last week, a press release was issued by Ellacotya that suggested something quite startling — HTTP (Hyper Text Transfer Protocol, aka Web traffic) had for the first time in four years overtaken P2P traffic. However a new article from Slyck disputes this, and contends that P2P remains the bandwidth heavyweight."

Comments

Protocol?

[dreamchaser]

Here I thought P2P was a class of applications, you know, ones that communicate peer to peer.

WTF. We can't even blame editors for this crap anymore, because they gave us the Firehose.

Re:Protocol?

[Nephrite]

Don't you know that P2P stands for "Protocol to Pirate"? Shame on you!

That'll be AJAX

[Anonymous Coward]

HTTP (Hyper Text Transfer Protocol, aka Web traffic) had for the first time in four years overtaken P2P traffic

That'll be because AJAX has lead to a massive increase in HTTP traffic. How much traffic do the Web 2.0 "applications" from Google alone generate, do you think?

Many people have been saying that Web 2.0 is an utterly wasteful way to do things. There's the proof. Now can we stop building Web 2.0 "applications", please?

Re:That'll be AJAX

[Phil John]

Sure,

when the public decides that they'd like to go back to waiting for a page-refresh to be able to do anything. When I first got a Gmail account I re-activated a long-dormant HoTMaiL account to compare it with and the difference in speed was like day and night.

Web 2.0 may be quite wasteful in the amount of traffic being sent, but in these days of streaming video sites like YouTube we're talking about a drop in the ocean.

IMHO the benefits far outweigh the drawbacks. To all the naysayers that opine about what to do when you don't have any net access, we're also moving into an era where you can, with a few caveats, be always on the net wherever you are. I live in the UK and with HSDPA, 3G and GPRS coverage I have a link to the internet about 98-99% of the time as I move about throughout the day. Accessing Web 2.0 apps via Opera Mobile on my Vario II is more than bearable (esp. with the new "grab and scroll" feature in 8.65). With the new crop of mobile AJAX apps being developed for the iPhone things could start getting very interesting.

Re:That'll be AJAX

[arivanov]

You are painting a very entertaining rosy picture as far as the UK is concerned.

So let's see one day when I actually need a mobile access and the reality of mobile data in the UK not through pink mobile operator marketing glasses. So let's see shall we?

1. Get up, sync the laptop, leave the house - so far nothing mobile, do not need it.
2. Get on the train to Cambridge to London train. Try to connect to the net. Available GPRS timeslots at the Camrbidge railway station - around 2 (Vodafone and O2 are roughly the same here). Available capacity before 9am - 0bytes per second. The cretinous f***heads at the operator end QoS up the Blackberry traffic so if you have a train full of business people the capacity for the other data users is 0. Slightly better after 9, but still abissmall. 3G is a tad bit better, but this is temporary due to the low penetration of the 3G BB.
3. Train Cambridge to London - no 3G coverage half of the time, GPRS coverage around 1 timeslot when available. 6+ tunnels most of them long enough to cause a VPN timeout and cause a reconnect (3G is slightly better due to soft handover here, but it is not available). Overall - just about usefull to reply a couple of emails. Browse? You gotta be kidding. In the morning - totally impossible due to BB eating all capacity. After that - about as bad as browsing on a 14400 modem.
4. London - tube. No coverage. Whatsoever. The sole reason that our best beloved Mayor is a greedy c***. London tube refuses to put DAS or picocells because they want to give it exlcusively to a single operator and shave the profits. There is a ruling by the competition comission that this is not acceptable so the tube simply does not put any access in. Result - no access. 3G or no 3G.
5. Arrive wherver - no need for 3G or GPRS as there is network and/or wireless.

So overall - out of the 4h a day when I needed GPRS/3G coverage I got on the average around 10Kbit per second and it was unavailable half of the time. That is not service you can rely on. That is sh*te.

Re:That'll be AJAX

[Intron]

Loading the whole page gets twenty "item unchanged, already in cache" and one new piece. So pressing a button may create a load on your browser to redraw the whole page, but not that much bandwidth.

Web 2.0 applications seem to like maintaining a connection and continuously downloading some piece of meaningless crap. One travel site I was on recently was refreshing so much that my PC was practically unuseable. The page wasn't actually changing, just being continuously "updated".

Nitpicking

[TorKlingberg]

P2P is not one protocol, but many. Some P2P systems, such as Gnutella, even use HTTP for file transfers.

So true

[vivaoporto]

A lot of P2P applications even uses http in one phase or another of its execution, what is the case of bittorrent clients communication with trackers, that is done over using http requests.

What they might be implying is that the so called "legitimate" traffic (casual WWW surfing) is outpacing filesharing. Ironically, this growing is due the popularization of tools that allow users to share the files via www, tools like Youtube and Flickr (and pornotube, *cough*) that they would share via P2P applications like Kazaa, Napster or IMesh.

Bottom line is: people don't care about the tools, but about the use they do to the tools. Nothing to see here, move along.

If I was designing a P2P network today

[Colin Smith]

It'd be http based. Not for efficiency or any technical reason, but because it's the best camouflage.

conflict of interest

[Anonymous Coward]

Ellacoya are well-known for selling routers optimised (and I use that word with the kind of looseness only Goatse man can convey) for bandwidth shaping, in particular for throttling P2P. PlusNet were one of the first ISPs in the UK to be hated for widespread deployment of their kit.

Remember, a press release is almost always marketing; and this form of marketing is about getting people to purcahse solutions for problems that don't quite exist as described. (Microsoft are good at this; Google are first rate.)

2 reasons

[Opportunist]

Youtube (and similar services) and trojans.

Both rely heavily on HTTP for data transfer. But then again, how do you measure that? By port? By header? Who keeps me from running a HTTP server on port 21? Who dictates that I must not wrap a package into a HTTP header so the corporate firewall doesn't get irate?

Generally, I doubt that you can reliably measure it. Especially with P2P services soon implementing a wrapper to fool anti net-neutrality laws and traffic shaping the various ISPs either will implement soon or employ already.