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.'"
Scheduling (Score:5, Interesting)
Much more likely people are rescheduling their P2P downloads to run outside of peak hours. I know my ISP (Virgin Media) throttles connection speeds during peak hours, so I schedule anything I want to download to run outside of those times.
Re:Another possible cause (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
From first hand experience I can agree with that to a degree, however I believe it's a multitude of factors playing out here.Traffic Shaping as well as more aggressive bandwidth caps and the increased availability of residential low priced, low allowance pay per GB plans and perhaps to a lesser to degree more people getting more things done with mobile data plans (iphone, non wifi laptop access). That being said, I've found the speed of my torrents at any time of the day much greater than say a year ago.
Non P2P Substitute (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Another possible cause (Score:3, Interesting)
Or maybe, like I've done, people are switching back to direct downloading.
Why waste your time installing and setting up an application (incl. firewall settings), when you can pay 55 euro por a year of rapidshare and download anything from anywhere?
eMule used to be really popular in Spain, with elinks flooding forums all around. Now it's all rapidshare, megaupload, easyshare...
Re:The other 80% (Score:2, Interesting)
i dont know which internet you are surfing but round here its all turned to kittens
Re:Another possible cause (Score:5, Interesting)
You forget to factor in that the vast majority of the "good stuff" is old, so people have now gotten all the "good stuff" and now just trickle download the more rare "new good stuff".
I think what they should do is dump all the good movies and shit on one server, get it properly sorted, then once people have their huge fucking collection up to date we just RSYNC from there and get the latest, could even mirror it locally on ISPs to save on international bandwidth.
Re:More reasonable explanation (Score:4, Interesting)
Interesting, my main change in P2P habits is due to the fact that most of the stuff I want is on rapidshare or megaupload, so instead of searching on thepiratebay or eMule (which I hardly use anymore because of that), I search on filestube. I used to download torrents of entire seasons of TV shows, but now all I gotta do is find the episode I want on megaupload, and as soon as it starts downloading I start watching it by opening the .part file with VLC.
But as for the real cause of the difference between day and night, QoS? Seems obvious.. Nothing necessarily malicious coming from the ISPs, for one thing they're right to have QoS for more time-dependant traffic, and then if you yourself watch YouTube or download some files over HTTP then your P2P traffic is gonna take a hit.
Re:Dissappointed. (Score:3, Interesting)
ISP arent shaping by port anymore these days - usually it's some other deep inspection techniques. There's no free/easy solution, and if you think you have one, the ISP's will have a countermeasure just as quickly.
Re:Rise in First posts attributed to traffic shapi (Score:5, Interesting)
Fact is:
- absolute P2P traffic volume is not dropping, it's just very slowly increasing
- absolute amount of HTTP traffic nearly doubled since 2007, thanks to major increase in online video and direct download services
=> many people often use DD today instead of P2P for filesharing
=> P2P percentage sharply decreased, not the absolute volume though
Too much of a hassle (Score:3, Interesting)
I hardly use any download 'services' because it's just too much of a hassle for me. First you have to find the files you want. Then you have to click through a whole lot of garbage, and after much downloading and waiting and clicking you find that you have downloaded the Spanish version without subtitles. Or something equally unsatisfying. I'd rather pay for the stuff than go through all that. And I guess more and more people think like that. P2P is a victim of its (not it's!) own success. More and more garbage is put on the web, making it too hard to find the good stuff.
Re:Poor analysis (Score:3, Interesting)
Also, video-sharing sites have had explosive growth in the last two-years, so it's normal that P2P is a smaller percentage of the total, now.
Re:Dissappointed. (Score:2, Interesting)
Well, since the report is provided by Arbor, whom bought the DPI vendor Ellacoya some time ago, we can probably pretty safely say that changing the port doesn't matter.
Re:in other news... (Score:3, Interesting)
the xIAA are targeting P2P users, so people move away from P2P. what's traffic shaping got to do with it?
All the non-techie people I know continue to use P2P like it was the year 2000. It's only the people who know their oats that use any other services or protocols, and most of those guys switched when Metallica went apeshit at the start of the century.
Nothing changed over the xIAA lawsuits, as far as I can tell.
Internet Prime Time (Score:5, Interesting)
I am involved with an Internet streaming site (AmericaFree.TV) and our traffic patterns follow normal Television "Prime Time" - i.e., traffic peaks at roughly 6:00 PM to Midnight in the evening. This happens in the US, Europe and Asia, and the local time zone pattern looks a lot like the "Consumer-Internet traffic" graph (# 2 in the original article [arbornetworks.com]). (Note that all of these graphs do not start at zero traffic, but some higher value, like 50%). In our case (long format video), there appears to be relatively little streaming from at work.
If you look at Craig Labovitz's previous's post, What Europeans do at Night [arbornetworks.com], it appears that European Internet usage drops quickly after dinner time, but I would interpret these graphs a little differently - European traffic starts dropping at 10;00 PM, while US traffic starts dropping at Midnight. This roughly matches what we see, and also European TV viewing patterns (see pages 22 and 23 of this presenation [authorstream.com]). Of course, American TV prime time is pretty similar to Europe's. Putting all of this together, I don't think that streaming video is driving the differences seen by Labovitz.
An interesting corollary of all of this is that there is still substantial bandwidth available for P2P in the hours after midnight. Off-hours P2P use could triple and still not be more than the current day-time use.
Re:ISP awareness (Score:5, Interesting)
You're right. There IS more to this. What has happened over the last two years? People have spent more time downloading videos off hulu.com or youtube.com or other video-sharing sites,
As a result overall traffic has gone up, while peer-to-peer has remained relatively steady. Therefore P2P has dropped relative to all the other traffic on the web, even though people are still downloading the same amount as always.
Re:Scheduling (Score:3, Interesting)
60kb/s?? Jeez, I could dial it to 1MB/s and still have bandwidth to spare O_O
Re:Scheduling (Score:3, Interesting)
I'm sure you can but my internet still downloads movies/TV shows faster than I can keep up (in other words my HDD is full), and it only costs $14.99 a month. How much is yours?
And while we're discussing budgeting here's some other ways I save money:
- cable TV - $0.00.* I use an antenna instead and get ~35 channels
- cellphone - $0 a month at 18 cents/minute
- credit cards - most give1% off; one of them gives 5% for gasoline & food purchases
*
* another alternative I've considered is Dish which is only $20/month
Re:Obvious explanation: encryption (Score:3, Interesting)
then they will take countermeasures, if they don't interactive performance on their oversold "up to speed X" network will become terrible.
they could just get us to play nice and use QOS so we can mark out torrent traffic/large downloads as bulk and our browsing as browsing, I suppose that is traffic shaping, but atm virgin broadband work something like this
if they catch bittorrent packets or you have encrypted upload's > ~30Kib/s, then they smash users pings up to ~4s
obviously a lot of pirates are unethical douchebags and will just mark all their packets voip, but providing a way for the rest of us to download nicely (pun intended), will:
*allow them to keep overselling ridiculously
*keep most of people happy
*reduce the amount of data they are traffic analysing (they can just scan for people abusing their QOS and do thorough inspection on them)