‘Shocking’ 61% of all Upstream Internet Traffic is P2P
Written by Ernesto on October 21, 2008Sandvine, best known for manufacturing the hardware that slowed down BitTorrent users on Comcast, has released an Internet traffic trends report today. The report shows that, on average, P2P traffic is responsible for more than half of the upstream traffic, but mostly the report seems an attempt to sell their traffic shaping products.
Over the years, many Internet traffic reports have been published. Back in 2004, long before the BitTorrent boom had started, studies already indicated that BitTorrent was responsible for an impressive 35% of all Internet traffic.
Since then, we’ve seen a couple of dozen reports, all with a totally different outcome. Some estimate that P2P traffic represents approximately 50% of the total traffic, while others go as high as 85%, or as low as 20%. The overall consensus seems to be that there is little consensus, or is there?
We think we might have spotted a trend, not so much in the data, but in the companies that publish these reports. Most Internet traffic research is conducted by companies that offer traffic shaping and broadband management solutions. Cachelogic, Ipoque, Sandvine, they all sell (or sold) products that help ISPs to manage their traffic.
Consequently, it is not a big surprise that their presentation of the results is often a little biased. After all, it is in their best interests to overestimate the devastating effects P2P traffic has, and convince ISPs that they need to throttle these awful bandwidth hogs.
Or as Sandvine co-founder Dave Caputo puts it: “Bulk bandwidth applications like P2P are on all day, everyday and are unaffected by changes to network utilization. This reinforces the importance of protecting real-time applications that are sensitive to jitter and latency during times of peak usage.”
In Sandvine’s report we see that P2P represents less than a quarter of all downstream traffic, and even less during peak times. Web traffic is most dominant and online media streaming sites take up nearly 16%.
On the upstream side, P2P traffic takes up 61% of all traffic (the black makes it even more scary), followed by web-browsing, tunneling and VoIP traffic.
Interestingly, the amount of bandwidth that is transferred on the Internet has more than quadrupled since the first reports came out a few years ago, and it is likely to quadruple again in only a few years. Unlike Sandvine suggests, throttling is not the solution. Investing in the network is.
Previously: Pirate Bay Celebrates Microsoft’s Global Anti-Piracy Day
Next: Tackling College Piracy: At What Cost?
66 Responses
they make $$ by saying so..
but could be true
If this is fact it just goes to show how popular bit torrent is, on the other hand probably just a marketing ploy.
Why would this not be true -.-, think of another widely used application that uploads files
soo what the hell do we believe? nobody seems to have the real answer..
if the ISP would do a unbiased look at there own traffic.. i would most likely believe that.
But then again.. they cant.. since everyone is encrypting there headers..
I believe the real answer is that there IS NO answer.
nothing against ipoque. their latest study put p2p @ 3/4 of overall internet traffic (at least for germany)
http://www.ipoque.com/resources/internet-studies/internet-study-2007
err ftp protocol
Can’t understand why the ISP doesn’t promote bandwich utilisation. Just charge people the ammount used, invest in the infrastructure, promote, invest and get more monney…
Man… if I owned a ISP, I would definetly educate people on how they could used more of my product. Bittorent is great since you can forgot it one night and wake up with 10 gigs uploaded!! Hear me ISP? Promote p2p!!
Hmmm. Makes me wonder about the previous reports (though I’m clearly too lazy to check): what did they say about P2P downstream? Less than 25% of downstream traffic being P2P seems reasonable, and seems to hurt the position of those saying that P2P is single-handedly killing the world’s internet.
While I’m not entirely trustful of Sandvine given their clear use for bias in one particular direction, I wouldn’t be surprised if P2P was a huge part of end-user upstream bandwidth, and could imagine those numbers being true.
And you believe Sandvine? Their job is to sell tech, so it’s in their interest to make any stats appear worse than they may be. If they came out and said only 10% of upstream was p2p they’d have a hard time selling their crap to ISP’s. Its like quoting the MPAA’s figures on loss due to piracy as fact.
yes sir,
these asdgasdgas are here to stay and are going to drain you…
but you are in luck we just happen to have a asdgasdgas killer that just came in today, interested?
http://www.ezee.se
Breaking news; a new study from Tylenol says that as much as 70% of all missed time at work is due to headaches.
@ Sid the Kid :
At least you call yourself a kid because you sure seem to be clueless with a moronic comment like that.
For a start you seem to be missing the glaringly obvious fact that in invest an entity usually has to borrow (cerainly for infrastructure), in order to borrow one needs a steady income stream and in order to get that the entity has to “pre-charge” people by placing them on a contract with penalties.
ISP’s can’t run a business model where all their users can rack up enormous costs with huge usage in one month and then not pay for whatever reason (by perhaps going to the next company where usage is slightly cheaper) because they’d be left high and dry with bandwidth they’d already purchased.
Things are more complicated in the adults world you clueless dumb azz. Things don’t work according to your fanciful notions of how great it would be if it worked how you’d like it because your such a genius and your stupid Mummy told you you were smart and could do anything. Tard.
I love sandvine :)
It’s odd that Usenet did not make the list. It’s got to be one of the fastest growing services, and when it comes to binaries, one of the most bandwidth intensive.
Shouldn’t the upstream and downstream percentage for bittorrent be the same? I mean, everything somebody uploads is because sombody else downloads it.
It would seem in there world that gaming is a p2p practice as well. Because I’m sure gaming use’s more then the “all others” category
[quote]The report seems an attempt to sell their traffic shaping products.[/quote]
I’m appalled by that statement. Sandvine is a good honest company that cares dearly for the privacy and security of all citizens of the world.
Now that said ware having a sale on all of our deep packet inspection software. Come on by and check out or pricing and services.
http://www.sandvine.com/
#15
no. people have much more download speed than upload
“Shouldn’t the upstream and downstream percentage for bittorrent be the same? I mean, everything somebody uploads is because sombody else downloads it.”
No, because more is downloaded than uploaded on this. The upload numbers and download numbers for BitTorrent could be the same but since people using other things use their download more, the BitTorrent download is less in percentage of the total.
#19
No, for every bit downloaded, someone has to upload it. So it really should be no difference.
“No, for every bit downloaded, someone has to upload it. So it really should be no difference.”
But that pie graph isn’t measuring BitTorrent usage in bits. It is measuring it as a percentage of the total upload bandwidth usage and of the total download bandwidth usage.
Instead of measuring total bandwidth usage, think about measuring your own.
You upload 20 GB with BitTorrent one month. You upload 20 GB through other things that month too. In that month, 50% of your upload bandwidth went to BitTorrent.
You downloaded 20 GB with BitTorrent that month, getting yourself a 1:1 ratio. However, through other things like usenet you downloaded another 80 GB of stuff. In that month, 20% of your download bandwidth went to BitTorrent.
Same number in bits, different percentages of total upload or download bandwidth usage.
Whatever the actual figures it’s certainly the case that ISPs are reporting that P2P is a major percentage of all uploads in any case.
Usenet is in no way one of the fastest growing services. Actually it’s not growing fast at all. Regardless of whether you think it’s got to be.
The major growth in traffic is P2P (mainly BT and gnuttella AKA limewire) and tunnelled traffic which is most likely to be P2P or files from usenet (probably illegal pornography of some kind)
@20: “No, for every bit downloaded, someone has to upload it. So it really should be no difference.”
Nope, you’re still wrong. People using seedboxes will upload more independent of any ISP. In my case it’s not uncommon to seed to a ratio of at least 1500% on popular torrents.
So people will download this and no ISP is involved with any upload.
If you use private sites (which are very fast because of seedboxes) you’ll find that many people use them.
Screw crappy public trackers… so slow.
for every bit downloaded…
Percentages boy, percentages. Unless you happen to be lucky enough to have a symmetrical connection your perfect 1:1 is going to use a greater percentage of your upstream bandwidth than it would the downstream.
seedboxes will upload more independent of any ISP…
So, uh care to tell me how they would connect these seedboxes to the internet with no internet service provider? Sure it might not be in the owners home but someone needs to have a link.
“Screw crappy public trackers… so slow.”
Screw your elite-facism-seedbox-we not be scene but still better than the rest-bullshit. Your 1500% ration doesn´t improve your dick size.
STFU about Usenet.
There is NO SUCH THING AS USENET!
Do not google it - do no research whatsoever regarding the term.
Just stick to BT & FORGET it was ever mentioned…
Whatever it’s used for ISP’s have no reason to complain! We pay for it, We use what we pay for.
This article is a little misleading in that it suggests any sort of traffic shaping is “throttling”. This is an emotive term, and traffic shaping has a ligitimate place in an ISP’s architecture. Certainly comcast users were subject to an abuse of the technology.
I’m not disputing that these companies may be using these traffic reports to help sell their product.
The bottom line as anybody who has deployed VoIP knows, some applications do require some guarantees of bandwidth and network performance to be able to operate over an IP network. When you classify traffic in an enterprise, you do give applications like VoIP, much higher priority than file transfers, and generally file transfers are regarded as “best effort”.
Shaping and QoS are an absolute necessity to ensure the internet continues to operate. It is not an infinite resource. It is the abuse of the technology that is the problem.
…and 60% of the P2P is ch!ld pr0n. :P
61% eh? That all? Well, it’s not bad, at least there’s a few people out there who have the humanity to share what they have with others… :-P
If anything, what this shows our ISPs is that a huge proportion of their customers are file sharers. You start mucking around with the bandwidth we pay you for every month, you’ll soon start to lose us to competitors that don’t fiddle their broadband connections. I for one have got totally fed up with the so-called traffic management at Virgin-suck-my-media that I’m switching to ADSL this week. If fibre optic is so advanced and incredible, why the cock can’t it handle more than a few 100Mb’s before getting slower than making a withdrawal from an Icelandic bank?? Not what I wanted when I bought the bandwidth - and it’s indiscriminate, affecting browsing, voip, gaming, not just bit torrent. If you’re in the UK and thinking about getting cable broadband: DON’T! IT’S A WASTE OF TIME! You will not get all that you pay for!
So, if you’re an ISP and want to commit commercial hari-kari, go ahead and buy one of these expensive, patent-pending customer alienation machines for your network, and sit back as your users desert you in droves for better service providers. Hopefully you’ll be bankrupt in a few years time having given away your entire market-share. Hey there’s an idea: They should call this ISP Market-share sharing….? Virgin Media need a good fu…. oh wait, gotta be careful, them brainless tw@ts that go on about ‘ch!ld pr0n’ might be reading
@25 : what’s your point? Yes one connects to the seedbox from home, sure - sometimes one downloads the content on there - this varies between users but I probably down perhaps 10% of what’s in my box, the rest builds ratio and provides speed to other users - you know, sharing and making the site great.
Content that gets put on there comes direct from an FTP topsite or from another seedbox. Occasionally content doesn’t but most private sites require a fast upload speed for uploading content to the swarm which can only be provided by a seedbox. It still avoid an ISP for much of it’s life (and transfer history -IE uploads).
@26 : Screw yourself and keep downlaoding shitty content at pathetic speeds, I could care less. You’re the moron whose calling me elitist when I’m spending my money to make other people’s downloads blazingly fast and actually sharing more than I download to make others have their connections maxed out by downloads. I’ll bet you don’t do upload as much as you download even - IE. you playing with the rest of the clueless noobies who have a shitty experience.
And yes dude: ANY private tracker is better than the rest in terms of speed - find a big one and the content will be better also. Public trackers are slow for a reason: the vast majority of home internet connections have upload speed that is 7-10x slower than download speed. Add to that the fact that no ratio enforcement means (the majority of?) people don’t seed back 1:1 and one can see why the average user gets, as a maximum, a download speed that is as fast as they’re upload… again - as a maximum.
These are reasons why public trackers are shitty and slow. Never mind malware such as PPI, fake files and lack of quality compared to a SCENE TRACKER - the scene ensures a mediocum of quality so amatuers can’t get their shitty mp3’s up with missing ID3, crappy encodes of video - and the rest.
You seem frankly jealous of me. You should stop feeling so fucking clueless and impotent and spewing crap at me and take advantage of my speeds - decent private trackers are very easy to find and get into: try BitSoup for a start.
You obviously have no idea what Fascism means. You bought up dick-size - I bet you get no play from the schoolgirls you hang around with. My 1500% ratio (or higher mate) proves that I share my assets to make others experience better - something which I know you don’t do.
Sandvine is for losers.
Donut shops test results say that cops make very good customers.
From the point of Internet I don’t see the use of terms like upstream and downstream valid.
Upstream for one person is downstream for another. From the point of traffic on the internet, upstream and downstream p2p must be the same.
5.38% seems a bit high for VoIP traffic to me.
The Australian Model actually works for bandwith. You can get 60 gig a month for normal daytime and an additional 150 Gig a month between 3 and 9 in the morning (wonder what that’s for)
It occurs to me, that the internet protocol could do with some way of indicating priority of data. Not in a net-neutrality breaking way, but in a self regulating way. That is, the applications themselves indicate how time-sensitive the data is from the highest being things like VoIP, down to the lowest being continual bandwidth like p2p. I think most people would be happy not having their full speed for bittorrent during part of the day if it ensured other things worked fine.
It does…. it’s called the DSCP value in the IP header, and that’s what quality of service is all about. Hence why shaping is a legitimate technique that can be used for the good of the internet.
“the scene ensures a mediocum of quality so amatuers can’t get their shitty mp3’s up with missing ID3, crappy encodes of video - and the rest.”
Some scene releases are terrible! Just like some P2P releases are… But public trackers have *both* scene and P2P releases.
Or should I say… “sum scn rls r trble”. There.
dont most p2p apps have upload caps set lower than download caps ? how is it that the graph does not reflect this….
Wow, now that is fascinating indeed. Who would have thunk it?
Jiff
http://www.internet-privacy.pl.tc
If you’re not talking about Cable HFC node congestion, then most ISP’s get their uplink bandwidth for free. If you do research on how 95th percentile is calculated, you’ll know that its based upon the highest side consumed, which in an ISP’s case its always downlink that’s MUCH higher.
@12
It’s easy to call people stupid hiddin behind your computer…. By the way, Sid the kid is an hockey player…
Anyway, I stick to my point, if ISP would charge their consumer for what they used and encourage people to use more bandwich, they would make more monney. That’s exactly the way other enterprise like Kraft do. They give recipe with their cheese to let people use more of their cheese. The only problem I see is the infrastructure, more incomes means more investing. If you got to borrow, do it. I think it’s a good bet.
I thing all of us are addicted to Internet. We’re like alcoholic, we can buy beer at one store or another, but at the end of the day, we absolutely need our beer…
I admit I’m not an insider in the ISP industry but I know a bit about business in general. Got a degree in business administration afterall…
First off i wanna say to zarathustra, GET A LIFE!.. usenet is not a secret and its all over the net.. and besides usenet is already a target and has been for some time now.. they just are trying to find ways to break in and grab the info they need to proceed..
and also these stats maybe percentage based.. But, i’m sure without a shadow of doubt they are still doctored … some peeps have mentioned the use of seedboxes and such.. it is true that you could upload more than you grab .. but, the fact of them being able to even guesstimate a percentage from limited info they have is laughable.. they would have to search for hosts all over the world to compile such a list, which i can bet they didn’t, hell i bet they didn’t even go no further than to check better know isps.. so, this info is totaly bogus imo.. and should be toosed with the rest of the trash!
@ #32 Forget dick sizes, just impress us with your huge ego. Good job.
Investing in the network costs real money and I am sick and tired of being told I have to underwrite with my own cash, illegal activity that clogs the network, slows my own connection to a crawl, while you pay no more than I do for the privilege. Investing in the network is not the answer to this problem. Tiered services at tiered prices is equitable and simply means we all pay for what we take. But then again, none of you have ever paid for what you take. You are the problem to be dealt with, not the future. Not to worry. Equitable solutions are coming. Watch.
In 5 years, 283% of all upstream internet traffic will be p2p.
Zeitgeist: Addendum, people. Sandvine wouldn’t exist in a different economy. An economy where people want to do the right thing, and aren’t rewarded for doing something they should or shouldn’t have been doing in the first place.
I’m gonna keep posting this link because this forum is too particular and specific. Many of the readers and posters on this forum could benefit from recognizing that p2p IS the model for the new economy. And they need to know that if we give up in our fight for net neutrality, for our whole world’s freedom, we can only expect things to get worse. For every last person on this planet…
Here’s the link: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=7065205277695921912
wow! this is like printing money.
ISP can charge money if someone
is requesting data FROM their network (e.g. upstream data).
obviously some other ISP has to pay
for that, -BUT- since it’s
P2P (hopefully bittorrent), chances
are that they will see the down-data
turn into up-data again. IT’S A WIN-WIN situation : )
if u luv ur ISP UPLOAD!
Strange…what goes up must come down…..I don’t understand how up != down.
@ Dont get your point…
My reference about the seedboxes is not to say they’re not great things to have. The point was that unless you have it hooked into the tracker directly via a lan port (which would in itself be useless since they don’t transfer directly, by the way do you suppose the data going from your box to the peers might be passing through a traditional isp?), or you’ve managed to find the secret way to transfer data with no wires or wireless contact (ie: magic fairies carry your data away in packets for deposit at your local leech) then your data is at some point going to pass through someone’s link, even if that means directly on a backbone line.
@#32
You might be interested to know that, Brokep of The Pirate Bay told TorrentFreak: “We have more seeders than leechers now.”
http://torrentfreak.com/the-pirate-bay-smashes-12000000-bittorrent-users-080424/
Now, what was your elitist point?
BULLSHIT
you cap people in canada between 4pm and 2am
so what then is all the traffic that is unshaped and dont tell me its p2p cause no one dls at 25Kbytes
oh and of course they get stats like that , what business are they in?
ok also whats odd is take bittorrent the maximum it can be is a ratio of 50% to 50% or as they say 1 to 1
so it owuld be impossible to have 60% up and 20% down.
Unless there are suddenly aobut what
3 to 1 paying vips or paying donators that get extra dl form private site.
As millions more use open site shten private this statistic can then there fore be 110% disproven.
Do love your blog mate
http://geldverdienenonlineleicht.blogspot.com/
How is this shocking? I think its awesome! :D.
That’s what Highspeed connection are for.
can anyone tell me what software made those graphs? i like em
Dumb article.
What is “p2p”? it could mean so many things… dumb.
Rogers & Bell probably use Sandvine boxes..
Maybe I’m a bit dense, but aren’t companies like Sandvine (not to mention our ISPs) basically saying: “This type of usage is really, really popular… therefore we must stop it!” I thought that when demand for your product skyrockets, you’re supposed to jack up the price… not close down the factory.
Michael Jackson was really, really popular…therefore they had to stop him.
TV STREAMS TAKE’S MUCH MORE THAN P2P!!!!
THE MARKET DON’T LIKE P2P THAT IS THE
PROBLEM
this isn’t too shock to me.
http://www.raidz.net
No reasoned mined you are not underwriting anything, be intelligent please. There is a huge amount of dark fiber in the world, unused network capacity that was laid before the dot com bubble burst, was paid for by venture capital gamblers and is already paid and waiting. The current owners who acquired it on the cheap are pretending there are capacity issues so they can gradually turn the dark fibre on and exploit end users for excess profit. Banwidth is a very CHEAP commodity, there is only the cost of the cables which is the same for both you and I, the difference is the cost of electricity. And bandwidth uses very little electricity. It is a scam to confuse people like you that they have a valid reason to keep sitting on excess capacity and charge more to P2P users.
Sure, most of my network usage comes from P2P and I am only a casual user of P2P. These numbers seem plausable on network usage amounts. But, I for one would not have an internet connection at home if it was not for P2P. So don't act like I haven't already paid for my service please.
And as for tiered service, you have bought the corporate partyline con hook line and sinker. Tiered service is what they do when they have different connection speeds, if they advertise an unlimited 10mbit line, the end user should be able to utilize that as much as they want - it's the service they paid for. Hidden "fair usage policies" could probably be proven illegal if someone wanted to invest enough money into it. It's like saying "Unlimited gasoline!" and then denying the service to long distance commuters via a fair use policy after they already paid for it.
Final note, "net neutrality" AKA "common carrier" by a different name. This is already enshrined in law for good reasons with "common carrier" regulations. ISPs say google eats all their bandwidth without paying for it, but this is such an outrageous misdirection it's unbelievable. When you rent YOUR connection from YOUR ISP you pay for the connection because you like services from… google. Without google (and other free service providers), the internet would be a steaming pile of geek turd and undigested advertising without any practical use whatsoever. So not only are they trying to charge twice now for the same thing, they are effectively saying that your money doesn't buy you the right to access anything. Unbelievable it has even got this far. The unfortunate truth is top level policy makers are probably far better at getting themselves into top positions than making decisions and they may well allow the internet to fracture. Campaign for net neutrality and save the internet from becoming ad-shit.
14 references to this post
Responses are closed
All remaining responses will continue to be archived. Use the TorrentFreak forums if you want to discuss something.