Drop in P2P Traffic Attributed To Traffic Shaping

An anonymous reader writes "A new report based on data from 100 US and European ISPs claims P2P traffic has dropped to around 20% of all Internet traffic. This is down from the 40% two years ago (also reported by the same company which sells subscriber traffic management equipment to ISPs). The report goes on to say the drop is likely due to continued, widespread ISP P2P shaping: 'In fact, the P2P daily trend is pretty much completely inverted from daily traffic. In other words, P2P reaches its low at 4pm when web and overall Internet traffic approaches its peak ... trend is highly suggestive of either persistent congestion or, more likely, evidence of widespread provider manipulation of P2P traffic rates.'"

Comments

Obvious explanation: encryption

[ZakMcRofl]

I can't believe that in all those comments nobody mentioned the most likely reason for those numbers:
Encryption.

Most of the P2P traffic will be Bittorrent. All popular bittorrent clients allow to use encryption and random ports to prevent traffic shaping. Encrypted torrent traffic can - to my knowledge - not be detected by the ISP and is most likely counted as normal traffic in the mentioned numbers.

Maybe encryption is not very mainstream yet but the hardcore users will always enabled it (even when their own connection is not limited) because it will result in better speeds. So every encrypted gigabyte they used to download normally affects the numbers twice: it's one less gigabyte of counted P2P traffic and one more gigabyte of counted normal traffic.

On a sitenote: this is also the solution for those affected by traffic shaping: tell you torrent client to encrypt the traffic at all times and watch your speed go up.

No possibility of bias from *that* source!

[Black Parrot]

If I may be allowed to re-order things a bit:

A new report based on data from 100 US and European ISPs claims P2P traffic has dropped to around 20% of all Internet traffic.

The report goes on to say the drop is likely due to continued, widespread ISP P2P shaping

reported by the same company which sells subscriber traffic management equipment to ISPs