Drop in P2P Traffic Attributed To Traffic Shaping 251
An anonymous reader writes "A new report based on data from 100 US and European ISPs claims P2P traffic has dropped to around 20% of all Internet traffic. This is down from the 40% two years ago (also reported by the same company which sells subscriber traffic management equipment to ISPs). The report goes on to say the drop is likely due to continued, widespread ISP P2P shaping: 'In fact, the P2P daily trend is pretty much completely inverted from daily traffic. In other words, P2P reaches its low at 4pm when web and overall Internet traffic approaches its peak ... trend is highly suggestive of either persistent congestion or, more likely, evidence of widespread provider manipulation of P2P traffic rates.'"
Re:Scheduling (Score:3, Informative)
When p2p started out, few people understood the benefits of self-throttling during the day. If I let my torrents run during the day, everyone in my house can feel it so I have it throttled down. Then from midnight to 7:00am, it unthrottles and blasts away at full speed.
Re:ISP awareness (Score:4, Informative)
tangentially related to your post...
A major ISP in NL, Ziggo, has changed their commercials from "download movies" to "download movie trailers". I guess they felt pressure somewhere. Which is a bit silly as there -are- movie 'rental' places online where it would definitely be legal to download movies - even if downloading movies wasn't already legal under current law anyway. (distributing is another matter)
Obvious explanation: encryption (Score:4, Informative)
I can't believe that in all those comments nobody mentioned the most likely reason for those numbers:
Encryption.
Most of the P2P traffic will be Bittorrent. All popular bittorrent clients allow to use encryption and random ports to prevent traffic shaping. Encrypted torrent traffic can - to my knowledge - not be detected by the ISP and is most likely counted as normal traffic in the mentioned numbers.
Maybe encryption is not very mainstream yet but the hardcore users will always enabled it (even when their own connection is not limited) because it will result in better speeds. So every encrypted gigabyte they used to download normally affects the numbers twice: it's one less gigabyte of counted P2P traffic and one more gigabyte of counted normal traffic.
On a sitenote: this is also the solution for those affected by traffic shaping: tell you torrent client to encrypt the traffic at all times and watch your speed go up.
Re:Too much of a hassle (Score:3, Informative)
Re:in other news... (Score:4, Informative)
SSH you!
Re:Another possible cause (Score:2, Informative)
A lot of P2P users out there aren't aware that they're sharing their whole drive, and you want them to know about port forwarding? What about those situations in which you're not in charge of the network?
The only thing I pointed out is that, from my own experience, I've seen many P2P sites and forums which have left torrents and elinks behind, in favor of file hosting services like Rapidshare.
Believe it or not, the majority of file sharers don't belong to that elite you seem to be speaking for, and that mambo-jambo about ports and forwards and peers sounds a lot more confusing that "click this link and type those characters into that box" to them. If that's easier for them, they'll just leave, and the drop in P2P traffic due to this will be significantly higher than what you and your computer-savvy friends could provoke if you all stopped torrenting.
Beside, when I use Rapidshare, I get upwards of 950 kB/s for a single file from the beginning (most of the time; when I don't, I just ask again for the file and that'll change the mirror) on a 320/1000 kbps DSL link. Call me back when you get that on uTorrent, from a single TCP connection that won't saturate a multi-user router like 200+ would.
No possibility of bias from *that* source! (Score:5, Informative)
If I may be allowed to re-order things a bit:
A new report based on data from 100 US and European ISPs claims P2P traffic has dropped to around 20% of all Internet traffic.
The report goes on to say the drop is likely due to continued, widespread ISP P2P shaping
reported by the same company which sells subscriber traffic management equipment to ISPs
anonymous coward (Score:1, Informative)
1 reason
axxo retired :D i just had to