BitTorrent Still King of P2P Traffic

Written by Ernesto on February 18, 2009 

A recent analysis of the latest P2P trends wordwide shows that BitTorrent is still the most popular filesharing protocol. P2P traffic in general shows a slight decline, but BitTorrent traffic is still on the rise. It is responsible for more than 45-78% of all P2P traffic, roughly 27-55% of all Internet traffic depending on geographical location.

Ipoque, a German based company that specializes in developing bandwidth managing solutions for universities and ISPs has just released its 2008/2009 Internet traffic report. In total, over 1.3 petabytes of Internet traffic from several continents was analyzed.

The report concludes that the proportion of P2P traffic is slightly declining, while file hosting services and streaming websites show an increase. Most P2P users come from Eastern Europe, where 57% of all Internet traffic comes from BitTorrent users.

Southern America has the least BitTorrent traffic at just 20% of total, with the filesharing application Ares continuing to dominate with 28%.

P2P traffic vs. the rest

The data further shows that BitTorrent’s market-share of P2P traffic is still increasing. In Southwestern Europe it went up by 45% in 2008, in Eastern Europe by 23% and the proportion of BitTorrent traffic increased by 40% in the Middle East.

P2P market share across different regions

Interestingly, the report shows that approximately one quarter of all BitTorrent traffic uses protocol header encryption. Encryption doesn’t have any privacy advantages, but aims to hide the fact one is using BitTorrent, which makes it harder for ISPs to throttle their subscribers.

Overall we can conclude that BitTorrent has grown significantly over the past year while eDonkey took the biggest hit. Percentage-wise, P2P traffic is declining, but this is due to the increase of streaming and file-hosting services rather than a decreased interest in P2P.

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34 Responses

1 Feb 18, 2009 at 17:07 by Antihypnotic!

BitTorrent & TPB FTW!

PS: where’s USA/Canada statistics??

2 Feb 18, 2009 at 17:13 by r0ck

Where the hell is Asia and Northern USA? Without Korea, Japan and the US this statistics is practically worthless.

3 Feb 18, 2009 at 17:22 by M

@2:
Not worthless for people living in the other parts of the world.

4 Feb 18, 2009 at 17:29 by karamba

Are South Africans crazy? iMesh uses its own, proprietary, RIAA filtered network and according to siteadvisor.com it also includes malware. Only a limited set of files can be exchanged, videos are limited to 50 Megs or 15 minutes. BearShare and the fake Shareaza (the real, open source Shareaza is now at http://www.pantheraproject.com/ ) are clones of iMesh. How one can use such a piece of crap?

5 Feb 18, 2009 at 17:39 by @3

We are the only ones that matter.

6 Feb 18, 2009 at 17:46 by Sandeep

Where is Asia ??

7 Feb 18, 2009 at 17:53 by n3l87

I was also looking for Canadian stats, but what about New Zealand and Aussie land!? After all, Australia WAS the original pirate island…

8 Feb 18, 2009 at 17:54 by req

OT

how many euros for ScT they need?

9 Feb 18, 2009 at 17:55 by req

ScT invite*

10 Feb 18, 2009 at 17:58 by Anonymous

A different artical on same study says that p2p is still growing but is being outpaced be other protocols “Mochalski cautioned that iPoque’s study looked at overall network traffic and didn’t track specifically an absolute volume of P2P traffic. However, it appears that P2P traffic overall continues to grow, but that it is outpaced by other traffic, he said”

http://www.itworld.com/internet/62869/study-other-network-traffic-surpassing-p2p-growth

11 Feb 18, 2009 at 17:59 by ken adams

why would you post this without stats for everyone?

12 Feb 18, 2009 at 18:06 by MPAASS

These charts are a joke, they just can’t measure encrypted traffic and distinguish between encrypted torrent traffic and other encrypted protocols.

13 Feb 18, 2009 at 18:27 by Mark D.

If protocol header encryption is supposed to hide the fact that your traffic is P2P….How are they able to know it’s P2P?

I’m confuzzed.

14 Feb 18, 2009 at 18:29 by jack.ss

Scandinavia?

15 Feb 18, 2009 at 18:38 by Wth?

Whoa whoa wait wait…
They know the percentage of people using encryption?
How stupid is that?
If its encrypted how do they know its BT? O_O

Someone please explain. ASAP.

16 Feb 18, 2009 at 18:54 by kad

edonkey or ed2k is one network itself. There is also Kad. Source exchange and Kad gives you most results as for ed2k servers don’t give you most of your results. Also most traffic is obfuscated so it is harder to detect in emule these days.

17 Feb 18, 2009 at 18:58 by Anonymous

http://filesharer.org/

Let the music and movie industry know who the file-sharers are.

18 Feb 18, 2009 at 19:02 by Amule

The overall population using emule w/ Kad and servers enabled is actually very large. Try your search using search global search. At current time with blocklist (paranoid ip list) user count is 3.0 million on Kad alone. I would think ed2k has lots on it also although the exact figures would be hard to get.

19 Feb 18, 2009 at 19:17 by Anonymous

A artical from pcworld on same study says p2p is still growing

“Mochalski cautioned that iPoque’s study looked at overall network traffic and didn’t track specifically an absolute volume of P-to-P traffic. However, it appears that P-to-P traffic overall continues to grow, but that it is outpaced by other traffic, he said.”

20 Feb 18, 2009 at 19:28 by YATTI420

Why even show North America… Speeds are sooo slow here…

21 Feb 18, 2009 at 19:56 by r0ck

@3: Don’t be so condescending. I live in Central Europe fyi and this is a worthless collection of figures to me because it neglects some of the most important hubs and origins of internet traffic. Given the fact that there are absolutely no comparable units here this is a farce in itself.

You can create percentages like that with all kinds of irrelevant figures. For a detailed account … too little detail.

22 Feb 18, 2009 at 20:00 by chet

obviously the usa traffic is too hard to study…lol

23 Feb 18, 2009 at 21:40 by insert name here

tsk tsk….i thought i was up on all of this pirate bizzo but i don’t even know 3 of em

24 Feb 18, 2009 at 21:51 by insert name here

@20

oh, i see now, those i did’nt know wernt worth knowing about anyway

25 Feb 18, 2009 at 22:22 by Zeth

Declining as a percentage of growing Internet usage. Absolute usage of file sharing is actually going up.

http://commandline.org.uk/ethics/pirate-bay-trial-begins/

26 Feb 18, 2009 at 22:36 by ForTheHateOfCopyright

Wheres Britain?

27 Feb 19, 2009 at 00:23 by www.whatload.com

Edonkey? Seriously. I’d kill myself if I had to go back to using that

28 Feb 19, 2009 at 02:09 by Not sure

Not everything is on the bit torrent network. Edonkey is still a good “client”… a place to get files lost ages ago in the deeps of trash on the hdd’s ;], where no one has to make a release of it or sth, it just sits there…

29 Feb 19, 2009 at 02:11 by Not sure

BTW your clock is out of sync ;]
posted the message at 01:54…

30 Feb 19, 2009 at 02:13 by RIAASS

Don’t worry, in a couple of years P2P traffic will be NOTHING compared to IPTV traffic.

31 Feb 19, 2009 at 06:04 by Anonymous

yeah emule with kad enabled has lots of very nice stuff that can’t be found elsewhere.

32 Feb 20, 2009 at 00:14 by milfs

Time and tide wait for no man! Now I understand, why people say Madonna should be the hottest cougar on ==== AgelessMate.com=== she will never give up to hold back some younth time!!! Understandable!

33 Feb 20, 2009 at 19:50 by MPAASS

@32: DIE

34 Feb 21, 2009 at 02:15 by noone

what a report…, LOL must be from the usa, missing, incomplete,
and that continent, germany, is that north, south, or east from mainland europe??………:-)

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