BitTorrent Is No Longer the 'King' of Upstream Internet Traffic (torrentfreak.com) 37
An anonymous reader quotes a report from TorrentFreak: Back in 2004, in the pre-Web 2.0 era, research indicated that BitTorrent was responsible for an impressive 35% of all Internet traffic. At the time, file-sharing via peer-to-peer networks was the main traffic driver as no other services consumed large amounts of bandwidth. Fast-forward two decades and these statistics are ancient history. With the growth of video streaming, including services such as YouTube, Netflix, and TikTok, file-sharing traffic is nothing more than a drop in today's data pool. [...]
This week, Canadian broadband management company Sandvine released its latest Global Internet Phenomena Report which makes it clear that BitTorrent no longer leads any charts. The latest data show that video and social media are the leading drivers of downstream traffic, accounting for more than half of all fixed access and mobile data worldwide. Needless to say, BitTorrent is nowhere to be found in the list of 'top apps'. Looking at upstream traffic, BitTorrent still has some relevance on fixed access networks where it accounts for 4% of the bandwidth. However, it's been surpassed by cloud storage apps, FaceTime, Google, and YouTube. On mobile connections, BitTorrent no longer makes it into the top ten. The average of 46 MB upstream traffic per subscriber shouldn't impress any file-sharer. However, since only a small percentage of all subscribers use BitTorrent, the upstream traffic per user is of course much higher.
This week, Canadian broadband management company Sandvine released its latest Global Internet Phenomena Report which makes it clear that BitTorrent no longer leads any charts. The latest data show that video and social media are the leading drivers of downstream traffic, accounting for more than half of all fixed access and mobile data worldwide. Needless to say, BitTorrent is nowhere to be found in the list of 'top apps'. Looking at upstream traffic, BitTorrent still has some relevance on fixed access networks where it accounts for 4% of the bandwidth. However, it's been surpassed by cloud storage apps, FaceTime, Google, and YouTube. On mobile connections, BitTorrent no longer makes it into the top ten. The average of 46 MB upstream traffic per subscriber shouldn't impress any file-sharer. However, since only a small percentage of all subscribers use BitTorrent, the upstream traffic per user is of course much higher.
Good! (Score:3)
Good! Freeloaders ^H^H^H political dissidents then get less chances to be detected or will be at least less noticeable.
Re:Good! (Score:4, Insightful)
It's pretty much game-over for the speculative invoice mills threatening to sue people for copyright infringement, because courts are not having it. With the widespread deployment of CGNAT the ISPs can't tell who it was anyway. Add VPNs on top and the fact that almost all traffic is encrypted now, and you can see why they mostly concentrate on the sites hosting .torrent files and pirate streams.
Re: (Score:2)
it's all gone underground of course, just evolution in action
the internet was designed to reroute
confirmed (Score:1)
Re:confirmed (Score:4, Funny)
Teenagers around here leave FaceTime on all night with bf/gf
I really don't want to know how you know this.
Re: (Score:2)
Chances are, not so different from how you now know.
That'd be "not at all". Shit, I have a difficult enough time keeping up with which celebrity teenagers are even still teenagers. Caught myself the other day saying "Doesn't that movie have one of the kids from Stranger Things in it?", then realized they're all probably in their 20s by now.
Re: confirmed (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
It's what people who aren't poor use.
I'm happy that BitTorrent is below the radar (Score:2, Insightful)
Streaming services can and do remove their content without any notice. In some instances, no DVDs and Blurays are available, and there is no legal way to watch any more. BitTorrent users have access to a wider range of movies and TV shows than if they subscribed to all the combined streaming services.
https://xkcd.com/553/ [xkcd.com]
Re: I'm happy that BitTorrent is below the radar (Score:5, Funny)
Have you tried this one?
http://torrentmaster.tv [fbi.gov]
VPN? (Score:5, Insightful)
It wouldn't be surprising if a lot of torrent users would be using it through a VPN. They've become quite popular, common and cheap, and rise in torrent tracking companies and "pay or we sue you" legal trolls pushed a lot of heavy torrent users to them.
In which case broadband management company would have no idea what that account is doing.
Re: (Score:1)
Depends on the VPN. Some, like the VPN mentioned here [wikipedia.org] are worse than nothing at all. However, ones in Europe like Mullvad or Swissvpn tend to have a better reputation.
The ideal is a seedbox somewhere, where one can have all that stuff done offshore, then fetch your goodies via SFTP.
Re: (Score:2)
The ideal is a seedbox somewhere, where one can have all that stuff done offshore, then fetch your goodies via SFTP.
This is the way, except that generally seedboxes are a paid service and depending on your budget you might end up doing more piracy so you're not paying for Netflix, Paramount+, Max, Disney+, Amazon Prime, all on top of your access to the high seas via a seedbox service. That all starts to add up.
Re: (Score:2)
I was doing that for a bit, but then I mashed Transmission and a VPN client together in one container and started using that. Files land directly on my home server, while the VPN endpoint is in a country that takes a more relaxed view of "sailing the high seas." Keeping this URL [magnet] in your BitTorrent client allows you to quickly verify that the VPN is doing its job.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: VPN? (Score:3)
Then those traffic stats would be lead by VPN connections, wouldn't they.. Kids I know nor my friends have the slightest idea about either VPN or torrents. Their traffic overwhelmingly goes to 5 or 10 apps or services provided to them by the uberlords of the interwebs. Internet, the democrization of knowledge, amirite. /s
Re: (Score:2)
Also because a lot of ISPs are now using CGNAT, which prevents users from receiving inbound connections.
If none of the peers in a torrent swarm can receive inbound connections then you end up with a deadlock and can't transfer any data even if some of the peers have complete copies.
If only a few can (as is usually the case these days) you end up with those peers being a severe bottleneck.
Most VPN providers use NAT, and most don't support IPv6 so VPN users can often make things worse for everyone else.
As Data once said (Score:5, Insightful)
"I hate this, it is revolting!" (Guinan: "More?") "Please."
Judging by the amount of people who are constantly complaining about the the content on paid streaming services not being to their liking, it seems like folks still prefer curated content over finding stuff yourself on the high seas, even when the curated content is terrible. Piracy provides a better user experience, but I guess some people are okay with paying for Netflix and then whining online that the shows are trash.
The Cost/Benefit of Piracy (Score:5, Insightful)
From copying floppies on my C64 using two 1541 drives joined together with direct chip to chip to chip wires and the "21 Second Copier", I've watched piracy evolve for 40 years. While I was never a big pirate of music and movies (my libraries were pretty vast and legitimately purchased), I had a whole lot of cracked software. Especially in the early 2000s. But... I did torrent a LOT of television.
But now the value proposition has changed. Torrenting TV as a time shifting method made sense when everything was on broadcast channels. But streaming caught up in quality and quantity, and now torrenting isn't really worth the bother. Make it cheap AND good, and people just won't bother stealing it.
I reclaimed the space on my NAS devoted to TV shows years ago. Now it's primarily taken up by the full HD uncompressed rips of the physical disks I bought... except that I don't even bother with those anymore. Lots of the blu rays are movies that now stream in HD, in bette4 quality than i bought originally.
BitTorrent is kind of like traditional wristwatches. Only the old guard cares.
Re: (Score:2)
I still have my RSS feed of TV shows going. Great having any new episodes of stuff I want to watch just appearing which I use Kodi to play. No need to worry about what streaming service a show might be on.
I don't archive anything though, delete it once I watch it. Used to do that decades ago, but realised that if I ever want to re-watch something, a higher-quality version of it would probably be available and downloadable in minutes.
Re: (Score:2)
Used to do that decades ago, but realised that if I ever want to re-watch something, a higher-quality version of it would probably be available and downloadable in minutes.
I wouldn't be too sure of that. I've seen torrents become more ephemeral, with people just not bothering to seed very old stuff (which makes sense) either in existing or newly uploaded torrents. Streaming/commercial services are also far from guaranteed to offer old (obscure) stuff.
I'd say that a better argument would be that there is so much new stuff to watch, that incidental rewatching of stuff has too little relative value to do the archiving work.
Re: (Score:2)
Today it's still quite normal to have 1,000 Mbps down and only 20 Mbps up.
I don't know where you live but that's not normal around my neck of the woods.
Re: (Score:2)
Crappy internet is close to 10:1 for crappy things but normal is almost 5:1 . With the US gov broadband speeds being a 5:1
Re: (Score:3)
What are you talking about? With the fragmentation of platforms, the steep rise in prices, and them regularly removing content, it's entirely worth the bother again.
Re: (Score:2)
I don't know how much you value your time. Whether you front load it by building a seed box, and then mostly just file and categorize, there's still time there. Add in the cost of the storage, the NAS (probably), the occasional disk replacement (thanks, Seagate, for 5/5 DM drives failed in three years!), and it's not free. And without a seed box and NAS, you still get to navigate the fun of finding well-seeded torrents, dealing with a VPN, worrying about when your anti-virus triggers on the bundled malware,
Can we finally get rid of x mbs down, x/4 up? (Score:4, Interesting)
Since modern social media requires upload as well as download, now can ISPs drop the silly ideal of having uploads be a quarter the speed of downloads? Please? Not holding my breath for ISPs in Canada to change their monopolistic ways.
Re: (Score:2)
How much of that upstream is telemetry? (Score:2)
Those 4% that Google is allegedly getting... 4% of all my upstream traffic is supposed to be search queries?
I hardly think so.
Why Torrent YouTube? (Score:2)
YouTube is more interesting than studio films to most people and only the banned content needs to be shared p2p.
Boomers got their Netflix and Hulu, but let them be happy with it.
Well, yeah. Of course. (Score:3)
Of course I don't download movies or TV shows when I can just stream them (legit or not). And music I don't bother pirating since I can listen to whatever I want for, anywhere I am, at any time.