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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.'"
There may be a "market saturation" effect. I know people who were downloading gigabytes a month (maybe a week) of songs and videos, but in the past year or two they have tapered off. They've gotten most of the stuff they've wanted, and now are just listening to and watching it.
there has to be more to this. obviously the ISP's are very aware of P2P networks. They market this in commercials that say "download music at increased rates!" which are in context about purchasing mp3's but belie the fact that they provide infrastructure to P2P networks, and anti-IP scenes.
And im not saying that this is a bad thing...
... usenet usage has grown to 25% of all internet traffic. people move on (or in this case back) to safer technologies. the xIAA are targeting P2P users, so people move away from P2P.
what's traffic shaping got to do with it?
There really hasn't been all that much worth downloading as of late. You can only download the classics so many times, the new content coming out just isn't all that good, be it games, movies or music. I'm sure we'll see a small up tick when the new Star Trek movie hits the underground though.
Even my CD collection is gathering dust, finally music streaming that just works.
"The report goes on to say the drop is likely due to continued, widespread ISP P2P shaping"
The data allows no such conclusion to be drawn. In fact, since all they've done is compared P2P as a percent of total traffic, it's probably more likely that the total traffic has increased.
"A week in the lab saves an hour in the library"
So torrents used to compose 40% of traffic. Now it's 20%. What's changed in the last year?
* youporn.com and similar sites have popped up where they did not previously.
* hulu.com now exists.
That right there could easily cover 90% of people's media interests. Especially now that I'm not really into movies as much as I used to be (they suck more, and TV shows are, in some ways, getting better).
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
http://www.google.com/search?q=bittorrent+port+80
Just think if, ISP's are shaping 'p2p' traffic by port and then people use some other port for their p2p traffic, one might see a drop in 'p2p' traffic.
Invaders must die
Protocol encryption is just obfuscation, it certainly makes it harder for ISPs but can be detected e.g. with flow analysis. The unfortunate reality is that if encryption becomes the default in all major clients (we're not far from this already?) then they will take countermeasures, if they don't interactive performance on their oversold "up to speed X" network will become terrible.
GP says it's increasing slowly because the technophiles already use it, and normal people just go to http://video.baidu.com/
Also, other big services (like, say, video chat, google maps, etc) are breaking into the mainstream.
A corollary (sorry, lemma ... my math is weak nowdays) to that argument is that most people don't want to wait for anything on the internet. If it doesn't start playing immediately (i.e. YouTube), nobody who hasn't heard of slashdot will watch it.
Hum, my previous game where 500 mb in size... maybe 1gb. then they got to 2gb then 3, then 5 and now 10gb (or more sometimes but I don't play a lot of game anymore)
I strongly disagree, games do get bigger, with more texture, more stuff inside, etc.
Movie and music on the other hand are about the same size. a 5mb mp3 is standard, a 700mb movie too (unless you want a DVDrip with all the (most of the time useless) features)
Encrypted torrent traffic can - to my knowledge - not be detected by the ISP
See http://www.shmoocon.org/2007/speakers.html for Rob King and Rohit Dhamankar on "Encrypted Protocol Identification via Statistical Analysis".
Here's a brief recap: by looking at {mean value, variance} of {packet size, interpacket delays} going {up, down} and packet entropy for a specific flow, you get a point in a nine-dimensional space. Encrypted protocols tend to cluster together.
So here's the ISP algorithm: Measure a flow, find its nearest cluster, guess that behind the encryption is traffic of the protocol belonging in that cluster. If bittorrent, kill.
Note that Rob & Dohit don't look at how many simultaneous connections you make. That also tends to give away P2P traffic.
So the ISP can see you're P2P'ing. They can't detect whether it's illegal, or who should sue you, but they can (probably) see it's bittorrent.
Something like superchargemytorrent.com which tunnels all your P2P traffic over
a proxy running on port 80? To your ISP it looks like web traffic.
Try getting a legal torrent with a mac or Utorrent without encryption enabled then snap it on... see what happens to speed. The ISP is filtering and some times cutting out traffic all together (regardless of port jumping) (0kbsec). Encryption and signal obfuscaition is the only hope. (Datagrams anyone?)