Streaming is killing P2P

Dave Burstein on September 4, 2008  ·  Log in to Reply

Martin
Thanks for this. I had missed it. Here’s some more datapoints, although I believe an actual drop is rare.

Cogent’s traffic down 3% in June; Internet transit down to $4-10/megabit

The latest data from both cablecos and DSL carriers continues to show traffic growth, but datapoints continue to accumulate suggesting the overall growth rate is declining somewhat. Cogent is generally the cheapest provider in the U.S., offering gigabit Ethernet at $1,000 month, $10 per megabit. On their conference call, CEO Dave Schaeffer noted, “Traffic did increase in the months of May and April each by about 1% but then in the month of June we saw a significant decline in traffic of approximately 3%. … we saw a series of video and social networking sites who exhibited much more modest traffic growth than they previously had been exhibiting.”

20% Drop in p2p on AT&T Backbone
Other video, like YouTube and Hulu, twice as high
Easily a third of AT&T’s downstream traffic is now “web audio-video,” far more than p2p and the gap is widening rapidly. Hulu and YouTube are taking over, while p2p is fading away on DSL networks. One likely result is that managing traffic by shaping p2p is of limited and declining use, perhaps buying a network 6 months or a year before needing an upgrade. The p2p traffic shaping debate should be almost over, because it simply won’t work very much longer.

Jason Hillery provided some current AT&T information. p2p is currently still growing but “at a slower pace than other traffic.” During a period last year, on the Tier 1 AT&T backbone p2p actually dropped 20%, although that’s not typical. AT&T Labs VP Charles Kalmanek points out that a shift in customer mix, rather than an absolute drop in overall p2p, may explain that surprising statistic. A note at DSL Reports suggests that period included Comcast bringing more traffic in house, but I have no confirmation. Around the world, the trend is clear: web traffic continues to grow at something like 25-40% per user each year, right in line with the trend since 2001. Video is growing rapidly, but not enough to change the trend so far. Many of the policy people believe that p2p is a ravenous monster that is devouring the Internet. The data show that simply isn’t true.

AT&T has sensible plans to handle the load without disruption. They are already moving from 10 gig to 40 gig in the core, and planning a transition to 100 gig in a few years. The current projections are they can do these upgrades without raising capex, bringing per bit costs down along a Moore’s Law curve and keeping bandwidth costs per user essentially unchanged. Most of the optical vendors believe they can meet those goals, although some worry that the pace of innovation may slow down as the optical components industry is struggling.

AT&T Verbatim
“Overall traffic on the AT&T IP backbone network is growing at a pace of more than 50 percent per year. This growth is a combination of customer growth and growth in traffic per customer. Average growth in traffic per customer is about 25-30 percent per year.

To gauge the application breakdown of broadband traffic, we measure downstream traffic during the weekly busy hour. With this measure, as of June 2008, traffic was about 1/3 Web (non video/audio streams), 1/3 Web video/audio streams, and 1/5 P2P (with other applications making up the remainder). For the first time in June 2008, Web video/audio was the highest traffic-generating application over our IP backbone network.

As for the trends we’ve seen over the past few months:
— Web video and audio is growing at a much higher pace than overall traffic (more than 70 percent/year);
— P2P traffic continues to grow, though at a slower pace than other traffic;
— and Web traffic is growing at a pace consistent with overall growth.”
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Touch base freely if you need more data.

Lasse Enersen on September 5, 2008  ·  Log in to Reply

It’s probably killing P2P-enabled file sharing, but not P2P as a technique, as it is much more than just file sharing. For instance sharing home computers’ processing power is something that we have only scratched from surface.

SandMan on September 8, 2008  ·  Log in to Reply

“It’s probably killing P2P-enabled file sharing, but not P2P as a technique, as it is much more than just file sharing. For instance sharing home computers’ processing power is something that we have only scratched from surface.”

Really you are fine, but i think Martin is talking about share multimedia files, music, video, etc. I think, streaming could decrease the use of P2P, but here in Spain people likes to own the products so P2P is a good option. The worse about P2P is that it needs a high amount of users to be utile so if he number of users decrease, the utility decrease, and it could create a vicious circle.