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Report: P2P Traffic Dominates North American Bandwidth

By: Sherri L. Shaulis

Posted: 06/25/2008

WATERLOO, Ontario - A new report estimates that peer-to-peer traffic accounts for 44 percent of all bandwidth in North America, up from 41 percent a year ago.

 

Sandvine, a Canadian company that develops equipment to monitor broadband usage, issued the report this week after examining broadband use over time.

 

The company surveyed a number of "leading service providers" by monitoring traffic at the subscriber level and concluded that P2P traffic took up a fair amount more bandwidth than Web traffic (27.3 percent) and streaming media (14.8 percent), according to ARS Technica.

 

In terms of upload bandwidth, P2P accounted for 75 percent of all traffic, while general Web surfing took up 9.1 percent of available bandwidth.

 

According to ARS Technica, Sandvine's data is conservative when compared to data provided by ipoque. The German maker of deep packet inspection gear claims that P2P is responsible for as much as 90 percent of all Internet traffic and 95 percent of nocturnal traffic.