P2P major decline?
October 14, 2009
A new report suggests P2P is being replaced by cheap streaming video. According a report from Arbor Networks, a network-management firm used by more than 70 per cent of the world's top ISPs, P2P is falling out of favour fast.
"Globally P2P is declining and it is declining quickly," said Craig Labovitz, the chief scientist at Arbor Networks. Arbor's Atlas net monitoring tool analysed traffic from 110 different ISPs, on nearly 3,000 routers, for a total of 264 exabytes of traffic. An exabyte is about a billion gigabytes.
According to its sensors, peer-to-peer traffic still accounts for about 18 per cent of all traffic compared to 2007, when peer-to-peer peaked as high as 40 per cent of net traffic, according to Labovitz.
In its place streaming video from sites like Hulu.com and YouTube, and downloads from sites like RapidShare and MegaUpload.