A Sandvine survey of North American service providers found that peer-to-peer (P2P) file-sharing applications accounted for 44 percent of all of the bandwidth used.
Last year, Sandvine’s survey reported 41 percent of the bandwidth consumed was from P2P applications. According to the May survey, P2P file sharing is particularly hard on the upstream from users’ homes, with 75 percent of the upstream being taken up by P2P traffic.
The survey also found that Web browsing accounted for 31.6 percent of downstream traffic, part of which can be attributed to high-traffic sites such as MySpace and Facebook.
The three biggest traffic generators in the downstream direction are:
• Peer-to-peer file sharing (35.5 percent)
• Web browsing (32 percent)
• Streaming (18 percent)
In the upstream direction, P2P file sharing still dominates, consuming more than twice as much traffic as all other traffic combined. The three biggest traffic generators in the upstream direction are:
• Peer-to-peer file sharing (75 percent)
• Tunneling (10 percent)
• Web browsing (9.5 percent)
Focusing on the aggregate view, Web browsing and streaming combined to generate 42 percent of Internet traffic, which is consistent with the 42.7 percent found in Sandvine’s fall study last year.
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