Trend Watch: P2P Traffic Much Bigger Than Web Traffic

While looking through Mary Meeker’s 2006 Web 2.0 Summit presentation,
I was struck by the figures on page 19: “Peer-to-Peer (P2P) traffic was 60% (and rising)
of Internet traffic in 2004, with BitTorrent accounting for 30% of traffic, per
CacheLogic”. You can definitely see why this is the case, as P2P is normally used to
download very large media files – music, movies, etc. But still it makes you realise just
how big P2P currently is on the Internet and, given the increasing amount of video coming
onto the Web, how crucial it is going forward.

Source: Mary Meeker presentation, via CacheLogic

I followed up by checking out the CacheLogic
webpage, which has an interesting research presentation on its homepage entitled True Picture of P2P
Filesharing. Also note that there is an updated 2005 version of the
report on the site.

While it is difficult to measure P2P traffic, CacheLogic identified BitTorrent and
eDonkey as being larger than FrastTrack (KaZaA). They noted later in the 2004
presentation that KaZaA, the former #1, is now “declining rapidly”. Gnutella is noted in
the 2005 report as seeing growth in the US. Interestingly, by August 2005 “eDonkey
2000 has overtaken BitTorrent to become the world’s largest P2P file trading
network”.

The larger trends at play here (as outlined by CacheLogic) are:

P2P is not in decline, in fact it is growing at a sharp rate (see Meeker’s slide
above).
The “vast majority” of P2P traffic is of files > 100MB. While most of this is
video, there are other things such as CD images for open source software (see graphic
below).
CacheLogic says that a “significant proportion of the user population” is using P2P,
not just a few heavy users.
They call it the “killer application for broadband”

Source: Mary Meeker presentation, via CacheLogic