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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.'"
Much more likely people are rescheduling their P2P downloads to run outside of peak hours. I know my ISP (Virgin Media) throttles connection speeds during peak hours, so I schedule anything I want to download to run outside of those times.
You forget to factor in that the vast majority of the "good stuff" is old, so people have now gotten all the "good stuff" and now just trickle download the more rare "new good stuff".
I think what they should do is dump all the good movies and shit on one server, get it properly sorted, then once people have their huge fucking collection up to date we just RSYNC from there and get the latest, could even mirror it locally on ISPs to save on international bandwidth.
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Fact is:
- absolute P2P traffic volume is not dropping, it's just very slowly increasing
- absolute amount of HTTP traffic nearly doubled since 2007, thanks to major increase in online video and direct download services
=> many people often use DD today instead of P2P for filesharing
=> P2P percentage sharply decreased, not the absolute volume though
I am involved with an Internet streaming site (AmericaFree.TV) and our traffic patterns follow normal Television "Prime Time" - i.e., traffic peaks at roughly 6:00 PM to Midnight in the evening. This happens in the US, Europe and Asia, and the local time zone pattern looks a lot like the "Consumer-Internet traffic" graph (# 2 in the original article). (Note that all of these graphs do not start at zero traffic, but some higher value, like 50%). In our case (long format video), there appears to be relatively little streaming from at work.
If you look at Craig Labovitz's previous's post, What Europeans do at Night, it appears that European Internet usage drops quickly after dinner time, but I would interpret these graphs a little differently - European traffic starts dropping at 10;00 PM, while US traffic starts dropping at Midnight. This roughly matches what we see, and also European TV viewing patterns (see pages 22 and 23 of this presenation). Of course, American TV prime time is pretty similar to Europe's. Putting all of this together, I don't think that streaming video is driving the differences seen by Labovitz.
An interesting corollary of all of this is that there is still substantial bandwidth available for P2P in the hours after midnight. Off-hours P2P use could triple and still not be more than the current day-time use.
You're right. There IS more to this. What has happened over the last two years? People have spent more time downloading videos off hulu.com or youtube.com or other video-sharing sites,
As a result overall traffic has gone up, while peer-to-peer has remained relatively steady. Therefore P2P has dropped relative to all the other traffic on the web, even though people are still downloading the same amount as always.
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