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

Another possible cause

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Another possible cause

[AmiMoJo]

The reason is obvious - there are now easier ways to get free music. Just go to last.fm or Spotify.

Finally we are seeing sites that "get it" and can successfully compete with free.

Re:Another possible cause

[blackraven14250]

Because uTorrent is a no install, 30 seconds to port forward one port program that's completely free? If you have trouble setting up uTorrent, you don't belong here.

Re:Another possible cause

[Runaway1956]

"A lot of P2P users out there aren't aware that they're sharing their whole drive"

Sorry, that's not a P2P program. That's a trojan. Doesn't matter if the trojan is named eMule, Bearshare, and that the firewall/AV/malware filter accepts it - it's still a trojan.

We've read about Skype's hidden "features" of recording and forwarding conversations. When configured to do so, that's a trojan.

By definition, anything that forwards information without the user's informed consent is a trojan.

in other news...

[Anonymous Coward]

... 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?

Isn't much worth downloading as of late.

[r6_jason]

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.

The only thing killing p2p in the UK is Spotify.

[Anonymous Coward]

Even my CD collection is gathering dust, finally music streaming that just works.

Poor analysis

[Zouden]

"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.

Re:Poor analysis

[rawls]

The data for this report was taken during week days in July, when most big TV series are on a break (and as a consequence there is a lot less to download).

Whereas (although I couldn't find anything specifying the actual dates) the data for the study two years ago seems to have been taken earlier in the year.

More reasonable explanation

[CAIMLAS]

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).