Written by Janko Roettgers
Posted Saturday, October 17, 2009 at 12:01 AM PT

 

Is P2P Dead? Not So Fast

Network security vendor Arbor Networks has been drumming up publicity for its upcoming Internet Observatory Report this week. One of the widely reported tidbits is that P2P has “declined dramatically in the last two years,” and that it has been replaced by YouTube and other streaming video sites. Wired News took away from the report that “P2P is dead,” and ReadWriteWeb ran with the title: “So long, P2P, Hello Streaming Media.”

Findings like these are puzzling to anyone who’s been frequenting any of the big torrent sites lately. File sharers still seem to be as busy as ever, exchanging pretty much every movie and TV show episode you could think of. And didn’t Cisco just recently forecast that global P2P traffic will keep growing in years to come? Turns out, it’s all about how you interpret the numbers.

The Internet Observatory Report, which is scheduled to be presented at the North American Network Operators’ Group Meeting in Michigan on Monday, is the result of two years of research by Arbor Networks, the University of Michigan and Merit Network. It’s based on traffic analysis from 110 participating ISPs, and the total amount of data analyzed was more than 256 exabytes, according to an Arbor Networks press release. Yeah, I had to look it up as well: An exabyte is one billion gigabytes.

One conclusion of the analysis of all this data is that P2P isn’t as dominant as it used to be. In 2007, it accounted for 40 percent of all Internet traffic, according to Arbor. Fast-forward two years, and it’s down to 18 percent. However, that doesn’t exactly mean that P2P is dead. It’s just not growing as fast as web-based video streaming, which has been largely responsible for a huge overall growth of net traffic. In other words: A smaller piece of a much larger pie can still be a whole lot of pie.

I asked Arbor Networks Chief Scientist Craig Labovitz about this, and his answer confirmed my hunch that the picture looks very different when it comes to absolute numbers: “We found overall average Internet traffic growing globally at 35-45 percent annually,” he told me. “So the decline in P2P ‘market share’ is likely as much that P2P is not keeping pace with overall Internet growth as a decline in P2P traffic volumes.” Labovitz said that Arbor doesn’t feel as comfortable publishing absolute numbers of P2P traffic because of issues like encryption, but he still suspects that P2P may be dropping slightly even in those terms.

So what does all of this mean? P2P is less dominant than two years ago because of the explosion of web video, but it’s hard to figure out how that relates to media consumption habits. Some users may give up on BitTorrent because of Hulu.com. Others may still download TV shows, but watch disproportionally more web-exclusive and user-generated content on YouTube. Either way, P2P is still very much alive.

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Topic: P2P

Comments (5)

  • Great article. Why can’t Wired hire someone with some sense?

    Dan — 1:29 AM on October 17, 2009 Reply

  • It’s simple. Why bother using P2P and risk being caught uploading, when everything you want is available for downloading elsewhere.

    TV & Movies? Megavideo, yukou, tudou, and a million clones host the videos — while tvshack, surfthechannel and a million clones host the directories. And hulu and the network sites even have legit shows.

    Want better quality? Download straight from rapidshare or megaupload. Which also have every song, book, comic, game, and program every made it seems.

    If the media industry ever shuts down the one-click hosting then P2P will ramp up again.

    jim — 11:06 AM on October 17, 2009 Reply

  • This shouldn’t be all that surprising to anyone that’s been paying attention to what’s become commodity Flash CDN pricing in the last few years. The backstory there is that CDNs now enjoy cheap or settlement-free peering secured by the huge aggregate firehose of their customers (by which they originally amortized the cost of their buildout).

    P2P will always have its place as a delivery model for piracy (I’ve known this since Napster ;-) – but with last-mile bandwidth still highly asymmetric, and appetite for higher quality video unabated, the truly economic alternatives for delivering live or streaming video via anything but commodity unicast CDNs are quickly dwindling.

    Which is really unfortunate, because there are some network-friendly, self-organizing, multi-source “multicast” P2P protocols that optimize well for global bandwidth even if they don’t optimize well for the game-theoretic brinksmanship that is global peering. So it goes.

    In full disclosure, I sat on both sides of this at Arbor Networks and at Zattoo. If you really want to twist your noodle, compare the situation to the controlled chaos that is the Chinese Internet (China Netcom/Telecom north/south divide, lack of BGP, etc.), and what can happen in a parallel Internet universe where P2P is a crucial distribution strategy.

    Dug Song — 11:08 PM on October 18, 2009 Reply

  • p2p is declining in way of numbers but look at it this way if the RIAA and WPAA got rid of torrents and streaming video all these (old) programs like Winmx and Filetopia will come back to life like they were in 2004/2005 the goverments can put in millions of dollars or pounds to do what there doing now and it still wont have any impact on it

    Michael — 8:59 AM on October 19, 2009 Reply

  • I also wrote something on this story; First off I think it is important to note that measuring p2p traffic accurately is very difficult. Secondly the article is also a little vague about the context in which this is set; a decline in percentage is not the same as a decline in usage – if the overall numbers are growing also.

    Fore more…
    http://blog.catbot.org/content/p2p-traffic-declining

    Tom — 6:03 AM on October 20, 2009 Reply

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