Slashdot Mirror
BitTorrent Traffic Falls In the U.S.
First time accepted submitter CAKAS writes "After legal actions taken by several industry outfits, BitTorrent traffic has fallen in the United States to the all time low of 12.7 percent of internet traffic. However, this trend seems to be unique to the U.S. — In other parts of the world, like Europe and Asia, BitTorrent traffic continues to rise. 'According to Sandvine, the absence of legal alternatives is one of the reasons for these high P2P traffic shares.' In the U.S. legal content delivery has flourished and provided customers easy access to content. This seems to suggest that due to these alternatives, people are less willing to pirate and pay the publishers for entertainment." (Calling it an "all-time low" seems a stretch, when talking about something released in 2001.)
Filesharing lawsuits and six-strikes laws never did anything to stem the tide of piracy. What's been causing the fall of Bittorrent as a share of internet bandwidth in the US is the rise of legal streaming sites (Netflix, Hulu, etc), alternatives which don't exist in most of the rest of the world.
So, is actual BT usage going down, or is something else simply growing much faster?
Actually, the article states:
But:
So what does that mean? How did they conclude that there's little to no growth if the numbers don't even take a very important fact like absolute traffic growth into account? Just wild guessing?
And little to no growth doesn't mean decline. It means it's stable. So it's not really accurate to claim that "BitTorrent Traffic Falls In the U.S."
Maybe one will have to read the full report, and it's all there. But I don't think the linked article supports the assertion that BitTorrent traffic is falling in the US. At worst, it's growing slower than other services.
Clever signature text goes here.
Not to mention seed boxes that can be purchased for cheap. Why waste your home upstream, when you can use a 100mbit connection to download and easily transfer it to your home computer with ssh/scp/sftp.
Those companies must love seeing news like this. There's always another way..
Maybe Americans are getting smart and using VPN's and proxies :D
Or US Internet traffic is growing - something the ISP's & cell carriers are crying about on a regular basis. If the overall usage goes up, stagnant BitTorrent traffic rates - or if the BT rates are growing at a slower rate as compared to overall US usage - will look like it declined.
Or paying for and watching streaming media without needing a digital copy...rather than legal actions, it might be the fact that such options are more available in the US...
*sigh* So let them enjoy their news and hush.
Loose lips have been the reason they caught on with P2P in the first place. Why gloat, just enjoy.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
I and many people I know have been getting seed boxes. I think more torrent traffic is just becoming encrypted.
The reason BitTorrent traffic is falling is that everybody's downloaded all the old movies already. So now we're just getting the new ones, not catching up on backlog.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
They get taken down to much. If you are after fresh material, IRC DCC bots are the best way to get it (at least for things like Anime and TV shows).
My opinion is that most new stuff hasn't even been worth downloading. Several of the "blockbuster" movies that I've downloaded I deleted within 15 minutes. For other people I think Netflix and Redbox are an acceptable alternative as well.