STUDY: P2P Still Generates Most Traffic Worldwide

Though its proportion has declined across all monitored regions – losing users to file hosting sites and media streaming.

Ipoque, a European provider of deep packet inspection (DPI) solutions for Internet traffic management and analysis, has released their new "Internet Study 2008/2009" that illustrates the current state of P2P around the word. For the first time the study also included Usenet, making the results even more relevant to file-sharers.

For the third year in a row, Ipoque conducted a comprehensive report measuring and analyzing 1.3 petabytes of Internet traffic — the amount of data equal to 300,000 DVDs — from about 1.1 million users from eight regions of the world: Northern Africa, Southern Africa, South America, Middle East, Eastern Europe, Southern Europe, Southwestern Europe, Germany

The study includes DPI and behavioral analysis of about 100 of the most popular Internet protocols including P2P, VoIP, media streaming, instant messaging and many more. In addition to data volume, user number statistics provide a good popularity measure. A content type analysis reveals which kinds of files have been shared in the two most popular P2P networks BitTorrent and eDonkey. For the first time, the study also includes an analysis of average packet sizes of all encountered protocols.

Some of the key findings of the study are:

• P2P generates most traffic in all regions
• The proportion of P2P traffic has decreased BitTorrent is still number one of all protocols, HTTP second
• The proportion of eDonkey is much lower than last year
• File hosting has considerably grown in popularity
• Streaming is taking over P2P users for video content

The proportion of P2P has decreased in all regions. It is important to note, though, that this does not mean there is less P2P traffic than one year ago, but only that P2P has
grown slower than other traffic.

P2P still generates by far the most traffic in all monitored regions – ranging from 43% in Northern Africa to 70% in Eastern Europe. The regional differences can probably be attributed to varying subscriber access bandwidth, availability of localized content, and cultural habits. Interestingly, the two Arab regions, Northern Africa and the Middle East, share a consistently lower P2P ratio. This is compensated by a comparably higher proportion of Web traffic.

Also, in all regions apart from South America, BitTorrent is the dominating protocol followed by HTTP. In South America, Ares leads the pack before BitTorrent and eDonkey. Between two and four P2P protocols make it into the top-five list. One possible reason could be the availability of Spanish and Portuguese language content.

The overall proportion of P2P traffic has declined through-out all monitored regions since last year’s study. This does not constitute a decline in the absolute amount of P2P traffic, only that other protocols have simply experienced a proportionally greater increase.

The most significant decrease was observed in Germany where the P2P share has dropped by 24%. This can have several reasons. Some ISPs have reportedly started to throttle or de-prioritize P2P traffic. This does not only affect the subscribers of the bandwidth-managing ISP, but all other peers trying to download from those throttled peers, thus reducing the overall download capacity in the P2P network.

P2P Content Type Analysis:

• Video is most popular content by volume and by number of files
• Software is second in BitTorrent with about one third of the volume
• Audio files are second in eDonkey
• Less video, particularly porn, and more software downloads with BitTorrent compared to 2007

BitTorrent has the biggest share in Eastern Europe and the Middle East with about 80%. It has its lowest popularity in South America with only 30%. In all other
regions, at least half of all P2P traffic is BitTorrent. Four regions significantly deviate from the usual BitTorrent/eDonkey dominance. Northern Africa has only 8%
eDonkey, but over 14% Gnutella traffic. In Eastern Europe, it is DirectConnect with 18%, that replaces eDonkey. South America has an unusually high share of
Ares traffic of 43%. In all other regions, Ares is less than 2% of all P2P. In Southern Africa, we have observed a nearly equal share of around 15% for Gnutella, iMesh and Thunder. Thunder is a Chinese P2P network that is apparently used by Chinese immigrants living in South America.

Where do you live and what P2P protocol do you use?

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