Bandwidth & Peer-to-Peer

At the beginning of the year broadband users from UK were taking up an average 18MB of bandwidth each per day as Point Topic recently reports.

According to John Bosnell, Senior Analyst at Point Topic - “This comes to 280 odd terabytes per day in the UK and is equivalent to around 100 petabytes a year,”

After yesterday we were telling you about Sandvine’s report according to which P2P is accountable for 44% of the traffic over the Internet, the subject comes back to our attention. It’s common fact that most people connected to the Internet use their broadband to check email, use banking services, shop or just surf but the real consumption of bandwidth comes from a relatively small fraction of users. That’s right – they are p2p file sharers.

Bosnell points out the relativeness behind all the calculations regarding p2p traffic:

There are plenty of different estimates as to how much of this traffic is down to P2P, it’s primarily a matter of definition and there are as many interpretations as there are analysts and ISPs. Cisco reports evidence in the US that P2P accounts for less than half of total traffic and dropping, while Europe was around 50% in 2007 but due to increase slightly. Other sources have P2P growing rapidly, depending on exactly what is classed as P2P.

Compared to other reports (see Sandvine) Point Topic’s latest consumer broadband research is at the opposite pole – it actually shows a decrease in number of those involved in peer to peer file sharing, from 11% in June 2007 to 9% in 2008.

Bosnell even comes with an explanation for this: “Innovations like the BBC iPlayer and other broadcast related streaming services along with the increased number of legal download sites, particularly for music, have reduced the drive for users to download data via P2P sites,” says the analyst.

Until surveys will come to the same conclusion we are left to hear as many of them as we want and actually decide for ourselves where things are really heading out there.