Company that helped Comcast throttle BitTorrent traffic also says the net neutrality debate will “be laughable in the next two or three years.”
Sandvine is set to release a study tomorrow that will purportedly show that some 44% of network traffic on North American ISPs is consumed by P2P traffic.
The results are based on a survey that included several “leading” ISPs, but it’s conclusions are subject to debate since it obviously has a stake in elevated results that prove the need for the equipment it sells them to throttle such traffic and free up network bandwidth.
From the study:
The three biggest overall generators of Internet traffic according to Sandvine’s May survey were: peer-to-peer file sharing (43.5%); Web browsing (27.3%); and streaming media (14.8%).
Other applications, ranked by overall usage, were: tunneling into private networks (5.9%); newsgroups (5.6%); online games (1.4%); and voice over IP (0.2%).
P2P accounted for an even bigger portion of upstream direction, consuming more than twice as much traffic as all other traffic combined. The three biggest traffic generators in the upstream direction are peer-to-peer file sharing (75.0%); tunneling (9.9%); and Web browsing (9.1%).
Downstream traffic was also primarily generated by P2P (35.6%), followed by Web browsing (31.6%) and streaming (17.9%).
However, some have argued that in fact online video streaming is the biggest consumer of internet bandwidth which Sandvine seems to lowball at 14.8%.
“Four million people are watching a Barack Obama video on the internet,’ said Larry Irving, co-chairman of the Internet Innovation Alliance, a few months back in an interview with the Guardian. ‘Twenty-six million people watched Desperate Housewives over a six-month period. The American version of The Office got seven million viewers on TV and 2.7m online. We’re watching a slow but inexorable increase in the amount of time people are spending on online video. Whatever the number is today, that’s the lowest it will ever be.”
Surely P2P traffic consumes a lot of network bandwidth, but does streaming video really only account for a mere 14.8% as the study claims? Each day more than 7 million people watch clips on YouTube alone, nevermind sites like Veoh, ABC, NBC, Hulu, Joost, Vuze, Baidu, etc..
I simply have a hard time buying into an anti-P2P study from a company with a vested financial interest in the results.
Sandvine CEO Dave Caputo’s distaste for P2P traffic was also made apparent recently when he said that “I think it’s going to be laughable in the next two or three years that people used to say all packets should be treated equally.”
Network neutrality is “laughable?” I guess it is if you want to sell equipment to ISPs that does treat data packets differently.
Related Posts
- HTTP Traffic Surpasses P2P Traffic
- Net traffic shows file-sharing undented
- STUDY: P2P Consumes 22% of Downstream, 61% of Upstream Bandwidth
- Nokia’s P2P Traffic Control Solution
- Internet video now a bigger piece of network traffic than P2P?
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