Sandvine Reports that P2P Takes up Almost Half of All Bandwidth

According to Sandvine, a company engaged in developing deep packet inspection equipment to monitor broadband usage, P2P traffic is accountable for almost 44 % of the bandwidth utilization in North America.

Sandvine announced its intention to post the report which offers an analysis of movements in broadband use on its website. The results of the survey (conducted on several unrevealed "leading service providers") showed that P2P traffic is top of the “food chain” swallowing a great deal more bandwidth than web traffic (27.3 percent) and streaming media (14.8 percent). Rather unexpectedly, VoIP is “responsible” for only 0.2 percent of traffic.

Considering that content distributed through P2P consists mostly of large files such as music, movies, TV shows, applications, this amount of resource consumption compared to that coming from other Internet services does seem veridical.

But there’s another aspect we should consider - Sandvine may serve its own interest by saying that P2P traffic is the one causing congestion over the network as the company provides gear to ISPs which proves useful in throttling Internet traffic.