Streaming Accounts for 40% of Traffic

In researching consumer broadband habits, Om picked up some interesting tidbits from Arbor Networks, which manages traffic flow for ISPs around the planet. While Om had expected to find that peer-to-peer guzzles bandwidth, according to Arbor’s data, P2P applications are responsible for just 20 percent of traffic. Streaming audio and video from services like YouTube, meanwhile, are responsible for fully double that — or 40 percent — of total traffic. Wow, that must be a huge change from a few years ago. Most of the rest of traffic is traditional text and images.

Meanwhile, Om also reported on Vuze monitoring traffic shaping through a plug-in to its software Initial results are available here.