There is no reason to believe that BitTorrent traffic has decreased. On the contrary, today, there are at least 3 popular BitTorrent sites among the 1000 most popular sites on the internet, and even more in line to enter.

But on the other hand, there are more p2p networks that continue to grow, and new video streaming sites, that cause a lot of traffic. So is it fair to say that BitTorrent is still responsible for 35% of all internet traffic?

The famous Study

Let’s start of with the original study that reported that BitTorrent was causing that much traffic.

The study by Cachelogic reports the following (June 2004):

This indeed means that BitTorrent accounted for 33% of all internet traffic in the first half of 2004.

However, there is some geographical variation.

P2P traffic in 2005

Now let’s compare this data with a more recent study by Cachelogic (January 2006):

This study reports that p2p traffic continued to grow, even relative to the other internet traffic. Januari 2006 p2p traffic acounted for approximately 71% of all internet traffic.

However, the same study shows that the marketshare of BitTorrent decreased. It seems that the eDonkey network took over the lead in most countries.

If we take a look at the US for example, we see that BitTorrent accounts for about 30% of all p2p traffic. If we assume that 71% of all internet traffic is p2p related, “only” 21% would be caused by BitTorrent. On the other hand, more than 35% of all internet traffic in the US is generated by the eDonkey network.

This means that eDonkey is generating significantly more traffic than BitTorrent. This is quite surprising. In general most people believe that BitTorrent is bigger than eDonkey. For example, the respectable filesharing news site Slyck reported this week:

Although BitTorrent would soon become the largest file-sharing network in terms of bandwidth consumption, eDonkey2000 never faded away.

However, it seems that eDonkey is generating more traffic than BitTorrent in most countries. Take the p2p market-share in China, Taiwan, and South-Korea for example, three countries with the most broadband subscribers apart form the US.

China: 50% BitTorrent / 50% eDonkey
Taiwan: 41% BitTorrent / 57% eDonkey
South Korea: 5% BitTorrent / 92% eDonkey

In Conclusion

The latest p2p traffic analysis by Cachelogic doesn’t give a definite answer to the question how much percent of all internet traffic is generated by BitTorrent. It is unlikely that it is as high as it was in 2004. To reach 35% mark, BitTorrent should be at least responsible for 50% of the p2p traffic, and it isn’t.

My guess would be, based on the p2p traffic graph that BitTorrent is responsible for approximately 35%, eDonkey for 45%, and other networks for 20% of the p2p traffic. This would mean that BitTorrent accounts for 25% of all internet traffic, and eDonkey for 32%.

However, this analysis is based on data that was gathered in 2005, so it is likely that the percentages are totally different today. Not only the market share of the different p2p networks, but also the rise of video-streaming may affect these statistics. Youtube for example indexes over 45 terabytes of video.

“one third of all Internet traffic” might still be very close to reality, but we should use this catchy phrase with caution, and be aware of regional variation.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

So in the near future it could be that you’re downloading your favorite torrents from your ISP’s server instead of some random seed or peer at the other side of the globe.

Currently, “regular” BitTorrent is traffic is suffering from throttling ISP’s that claim that BitTorrent traffic is cluttering their pipes. This morivated the developers of the most popular BitTorrent clients implement encryption to protect BitTorrent users from being slowed down by their ISP’s.

However, Bram Cohen, the creator of the BitTorrent protocol and the developer of the mainline BitTorrent client did not believe that encryption was the solution, and found (tohether with Cachelogic) a more ISP friendly alternative. However, this new and improved version is promising the opposite, downloads will be accelerated instead of throttled. However, only for commercially licensed content.

Ashwin Navin, President and Co-founder of BitTorrent states:

“CacheLogic has developed an innovative solution to address a major problem that all ISPs face with respect to network congestion. Today, people use the Internet for many bandwidth-intensive services and consumers are increasingly aware of the quality of service needed for their favourite applications. With the popularity of BitTorrent usage worldwide, ISP networks are being taxed in a way they weren’t designed for. As a remedy to this, the Cache Discovery Protocol is providing carriers with an economical and scalable solution that improves the end-user experience for applications that consumers are growing to love.”

press release.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

Currently, “regular” BitTorrent is traffic is suffering from throttling ISP’s that claim that BitTorrent traffic is cluttering their pipes. However, this new and improved version is promising the opposite, downloads will be accelerated instead of throttled. However, only for commercially licensed content.

But how does this affect the widely debated “network neutrality”?

BBC’s Newsnight asked Bram Cohen, the founder of BitTorrent about this.

“I most definitely do not want the internet to become like television where there’s actual censorship… however it is very difficult to actually create network neutrality laws which don’t result in an absurdity like making it so that ISPs can’t drop spam or stop… (hacker) attacks. ”

Does the Cachelogic proposal violate network neutrality? “Depending on how you define net neutrality that violates some definitions of it,” says Cohen.

And would he feel comfortable if a media company using BitTorrent did start seeking network priority for its data?

“It depends really on the nature of the whole thing… I’m against net censorship. However when you’re talking about large file transfers going to very large numbers of people there frequently are significant costs involved… (the media companies) are frequently bearing a lot of costs already today. They make some stuff available and pay for bandwidth on it so it’s just a question of the download costs as well as the upload costs.”

hmmm…

read on

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

Between 50 and 65 percent of all download traffic is P2P related.
Between 75 and 90 percent of all upload traffic is P2P related.

And it seems that more people are using p2p today

In 2004 1 CacheLogic-server registered 3 million IP-addresses in 30 days
In 2006 1 CacheLogic-server registered 3 million IP-addresses in 8 days

So what do people download?

61,4 percent video
11,3 percent audio
27,2 percent is games/software/etc.

The average filesize of shared files is 1 gigabyte

thx r-win
Cachelogic

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.