P2P Traffic Is Booming, BitTorrent The Dominant Protocol
Written by Ernesto on November 28, 2007A recent study on the usage of filesharing applications in several countries shows that between 49 and 83 percent of all Internet traffic is P2P related, with peaks of over 95 percent during the night. Interestingly, the study also shows that about 20 percent of all BitTorrent traffic is encrypted.
Ipoque, a German based company that specializes in developing bandwidth managing solutions for Universities and ISPs concludes this from data they gathered between August and September 2007. In total, over 3 Petabytes (3 million Gigabytes) of traffic was analysed, coming from an estimated 1 Million users
They found that Eastern Europe has the highest percentage of P2P traffic relative to all other Internet traffic, Germany comes in second place with 69% and Southern Europe ended up in fourth place with 64%.
Below is a graph that shows the P2P-protocol breakdown for the different locations. There is quite a bit of regional variance in the use of P2P applications, For example, in Eastern Europe DirectConnect has a proportion of about 30% of all P2P traffic, while it is pretty much non existent elsewhere.
If we combine both graphs we can also conclude that BitTorrent is generating the most bandwidth in Eastern Europe, where it is responsible for 55% of all Internet traffic.
Another interesting finding is that Australia has the highest percentage of BitTorrent users, 73% of all P2P users use BitTorrent there.
Ipoque was also able to gather data on the number of people that use encryption. Their data collection methods support the detection of both unencrypted and encrypted protocols that use various forms of obfuscation, and they found that on average 20% of all BitTorrent users enabled encryption.
As we have mentioned before, keep in mind that Internet traffic research is often conducted by companies that offer broadband management and optimization solutions. It is in their best interest to overestimate the percentage of p2p-traffic and encryption because they sell the traffic shaping applications that help ISPs to manage their precious bandwidth.
From Ipoque’s data we can safely conclude that BitTorrent is still the dominant P2P protocol, and that P2P is responsible for more than 50% of all Internet traffic.
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57 Responses
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How’d they get this data? I mean, if my connections always encrypted, how would they know it’s p2p traffic? Tehy can’t tell i’m guessing.
how exactly do they know how much encrypted bt traffic there is if it is, well, encrypted?
they probably know what ISNT encrypted, and can work out the encrypted off of that…
btw..i am a different james to the one from post 2 :P
Quite interesting as to how much to believe in what’s fiction and non fiction.
For encrypted traffic, they most likely assume that large encrypted data transfers following the download of a .torrent file is p2p. (BitTorrent Example)
It’s good to see more people using encryption.
Ipoque is selling traffic shaping hardware to isps.
Those are marketing statistics with the truth more twisted than a polititians character.
The data isn’t encrypted..
Only the name of the torrent client.
That way the ISP won’t recognize the client used, and therefore cannot block your speed.
Data schmata. Back to d/l.
Too many novice users of bittorrent out there for my liking. (ie, too much garbage, too many bad seeds).
Hey, Ernesto
I bet Ipoque gave you a pre-release copy of that 190€ report ;)
Heh, well I’m not in Russia any more but we do use bit torrent, but we’re still used to ftp, like the old times.
[quote comment="226543"]Too many novice users of bittorrent out there for my liking. (ie, too much garbage, too many bad seeds).[/quote]
Good, then piss of and go back to limewire or pretend your in the scene :P
Even if you’re using encryption, the ports that are being used for bittorrent easily give themselves away with the current clients.
All the more reason to start moving onto VPN. how could ISP’s tell the difference then from P2P traffice to legitimate business traffic or streaming.
[quote comment="226563"]Even if you’re using encryption, the ports that are being used for bittorrent easily give themselves away with the current clients.[/quote]
By “the ports” do you mean any number in the world seeing how you choose yourself?
I don’t like the looks of these results, amongst users it’s been known for a long time that BitTorrent is very popular in Australia, but most ISPs haven’t payed much noticed, the one’s that have only did so to state that they wouldn’t be shaping BitTorrent traffic. :)
But these kinds of results are the things that spark the interest of ARIA (Australian version of RIAA) and make them put more pressure on ISPs. :(
BT traffic is easy to identify (even encrypted) because of the high number of TCP connections it forms. Now stop arguing and move on to real discussion.
[quote comment="226556"][quote comment="226543"]Too many novice users of bittorrent out there for my liking. (ie, too much garbage, too many bad seeds).[/quote]
Good, then piss of and go back to limewire or pretend your in the scene :P[/quote]
http://photoucf.com/randomfiles/screenyWaffles.bmp
don’t speak of which you know nothing of.
that might be slightly misleading as i just recently transferred stuff to that computer. here’s another screeny.
http://photoucf.com/randomfiles/screenyWaffles2.jpg
[quote comment="226644"][quote comment="226563"]Even if you’re using encryption, the ports that are being used for bittorrent easily give themselves away with the current clients.[/quote]
By “the ports” do you mean any number in the world seeing how you choose yourself?[/quote]
Actually no. First of all, trackers serve on a limited nr. of ports (i.e. traffic to the trackers is predictable, and as you know; There aren’t that many trackers, worldwide.) Second: Each announcement to the tracker can be linked to resolve listening ports (on IP or MAC basis). Third: Even when using encryption, the client is listening *with* known product tag. Many ISPs use known package headers to shape bittorrent traffic, despite their use of ports by choice.
By the way, all this is explained on the German site about this research..
What would the point be for anyone (except businesses) to have high or ultra high speed internet if you don’t P2P file-share?
If somehow all the file-sharing traffic was stopped everyone might as well go back to dial up. Companies like Rogers who sell movies as well as provide high speed internet would wind up losing a lot of the high speed internet business.
These companies probably think that if they ever get the “nasty downloaders” taken care of we would actually then buy movies they provide from them over the internet. Dream on.
This whole fight is so pointless.
I agree, the whole fight is pointless and I would go back on my internet plan to something slow if not dialup if P2P were to stop overnight.
What else is the point of high speed internet? Not like you need it for web browsing.
Also, what really annoys me is these ISP’s that offer all this high speed and complain if you use it, i mean WTF ?
Is this the only industry where you’re not allowed to use what you pay for?
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