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.'"
Another possible cause (Score:4, Insightful)
There may be a "market saturation" effect. I know people who were downloading gigabytes a month (maybe a week) of songs and videos, but in the past year or two they have tapered off. They've gotten most of the stuff they've wanted, and now are just listening to and watching it.
ISP awareness (Score:3, Insightful)
there has to be more to this. obviously the ISP's are very aware of P2P networks. They market this in commercials that say "download music at increased rates!" which are in context about purchasing mp3's but belie the fact that they provide infrastructure to P2P networks, and anti-IP scenes.
And im not saying that this is a bad thing...
in other news... (Score:4, Insightful)
... usenet usage has grown to 25% of all internet traffic. people move on (or in this case back) to safer technologies. the xIAA are targeting P2P users, so people move away from P2P.
what's traffic shaping got to do with it?
Isn't much worth downloading as of late. (Score:4, Insightful)
The only thing killing p2p in the UK is Spotify. (Score:5, Insightful)
Even my CD collection is gathering dust, finally music streaming that just works.
Poor analysis (Score:5, Insightful)
"The report goes on to say the drop is likely due to continued, widespread ISP P2P shaping"
The data allows no such conclusion to be drawn. In fact, since all they've done is compared P2P as a percent of total traffic, it's probably more likely that the total traffic has increased.
Re:Another possible cause (Score:5, Insightful)
The reason is obvious - there are now easier ways to get free music. Just go to last.fm or Spotify.
Finally we are seeing sites that "get it" and can successfully compete with free.
Re:Another possible cause (Score:3, Insightful)
Interestingly enough, I discovered a few days ago that my ISP offers access to its own "free unlimited downloads music website" to all their broadband subscribers (without any additional charges), which again suggests that P2P networks are seen as dangerous not because they distribute content for free, but because they are free to distribute without corporate control.
Re:Poor analysis (Score:5, Insightful)
Whereas (although I couldn't find anything specifying the actual dates) the data for the study two years ago seems to have been taken earlier in the year.
More reasonable explanation (Score:5, Insightful)
So torrents used to compose 40% of traffic. Now it's 20%. What's changed in the last year?
* youporn.com and similar sites have popped up where they did not previously.
* hulu.com now exists.
That right there could easily cover 90% of people's media interests. Especially now that I'm not really into movies as much as I used to be (they suck more, and TV shows are, in some ways, getting better).
Re:Another possible cause (Score:4, Insightful)
Indeed. Many popular TV series are between seasons right now. This ridiculously long lapse between seasons is utterly destroying me! I have to think and use my mind now and sometimes it hurts!
Re:Dissappointed. (Score:3, Insightful)
http://www.google.com/search?q=bittorrent+port+80 [google.com]
Just think if, ISP's are shaping 'p2p' traffic by port and then people use some other port for their p2p traffic, one might see a drop in 'p2p' traffic.
Re:Isn't much worth downloading as of late. (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:More reasonable explanation (Score:1, Insightful)
That right there could easily cover 90% of people's media interests. Especially now that I'm not really into movies as much as I used to be (they suck more, and TV shows are, in some ways, getting better).
You're getting older.
Re:Obvious explanation: encryption (Score:2, Insightful)
Protocol encryption is just obfuscation, it certainly makes it harder for ISPs but can be detected e.g. with flow analysis. The unfortunate reality is that if encryption becomes the default in all major clients (we're not far from this already?) then they will take countermeasures, if they don't interactive performance on their oversold "up to speed X" network will become terrible.
Re:Rise in First posts attributed to traffic shapi (Score:3, Insightful)
GP says it's increasing slowly because the technophiles already use it, and normal people just go to http://video.baidu.com/ [baidu.com]
Also, other big services (like, say, video chat, google maps, etc) are breaking into the mainstream.
A corollary (sorry, lemma ... my math is weak nowdays) to that argument is that most people don't want to wait for anything on the internet. If it doesn't start playing immediately (i.e. YouTube), nobody who hasn't heard of slashdot will watch it.
Re:Another possible cause (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Poor analysis (Score:1, Insightful)
Traffic shifting from P2P to HTTP:
People using Hulu and other places
People using rapidshare type services
The biggest bandwidth killer I have seen is YouTube.. People playing on there all day long just kills a connection.. Most all torrent clients have encryption on by default and some (uTorrent) are starting to use udp which isnt detected currently has p2p traffic.
At the moment i am not downloading much either, i typically download TV shows like crazy but most all are on break as another post as pointed out, in a month or so I will be back to normal downloading like crazy again.
Re:Rise in First posts attributed to traffic shapi (Score:2, Insightful)
I strongly disagree, games do get bigger, with more texture, more stuff inside, etc.
Movie and music on the other hand are about the same size. a 5mb mp3 is standard, a 700mb movie too (unless you want a DVDrip with all the (most of the time useless) features)
Re:Another possible cause (Score:2, Insightful)
Could there be anything more middle class than paying to use a service to download things you refuse to pay for?
Re:Another possible cause (Score:5, Insightful)
"A lot of P2P users out there aren't aware that they're sharing their whole drive"
Sorry, that's not a P2P program. That's a trojan. Doesn't matter if the trojan is named eMule, Bearshare, and that the firewall/AV/malware filter accepts it - it's still a trojan.
We've read about Skype's hidden "features" of recording and forwarding conversations. When configured to do so, that's a trojan.
By definition, anything that forwards information without the user's informed consent is a trojan.
Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)
You *can* detect encrypted bittorrent (Score:4, Insightful)
Encrypted torrent traffic can - to my knowledge - not be detected by the ISP
See http://www.shmoocon.org/2007/speakers.html [shmoocon.org] for Rob King and Rohit Dhamankar on "Encrypted Protocol Identification via Statistical Analysis".
Here's a brief recap: by looking at {mean value, variance} of {packet size, interpacket delays} going {up, down} and packet entropy for a specific flow, you get a point in a nine-dimensional space. Encrypted protocols tend to cluster together.
So here's the ISP algorithm: Measure a flow, find its nearest cluster, guess that behind the encryption is traffic of the protocol belonging in that cluster. If bittorrent, kill.
Note that Rob & Dohit don't look at how many simultaneous connections you make. That also tends to give away P2P traffic.
So the ISP can see you're P2P'ing. They can't detect whether it's illegal, or who should sue you, but they can (probably) see it's bittorrent.
Why not use a shaping defeat service? (Score:1, Insightful)
Something like superchargemytorrent.com which tunnels all your P2P traffic over
a proxy running on port 80? To your ISP it looks like web traffic.
The Plain truth (Score:1, Insightful)