Study: P2P dominates net traffic, BitTorrent is the leading application

[TankGirl]

Slyck is running an interesting story based on CacheLogic's study from last June. Some conclusions from the study:

- Peer-to-Peer is the single largest bandwidth consumer on ISP's networks
- Peer-to-Peer traffic significantly outweights web traffic
- Peer-to-Peer traffic is continuing to grow
- BitTorrent is now the dominant application in use - its share had grown from 26 % in January 2004 to 53 % in June 2004!

The study dispells the tree popular myths that 1) P2P is in decline, 2) P2P is focused on mp3s, and 3) a few heavy users generate most of the traffic. The study shows that 1) only Kazaa's popularity is declining while the overall p2p activity is increasing; 2) the vast majority of traffic comes from large (100 MB+) files; and 3) the majority of broadband subscribers engage in P2P regularly.

For example, 75 % of European broadband users are using P2P monthly, and the total population logged onto the major P2P networks at any point in time is about 8 million people sharing over 10 petabytes of data. This is nearly 10 % of the number of broadband connections in the world!

- tg