Shocking Study: Over 60% of Internet Upstream Traffic is P2P

Paul Lilly — Wed, 22 Oct 2008 12:27:07 -0500

Do you do a lot of uploading? If so, chances are high it's of the the P2P variety, according to a new study. You'll have to take the research with a grain of salt, as the company who performed the study, Sandvine, is the same one that manufacturered the hardware for Comcast's now infamous intentional throttling.

Be that as it may, Sandvine reports that while P2P traffic accounts for 22 percent of downstream bandwidth, upstream remains much more busy at just over 61 percent. A distant second is web traffic, which only accounts for 17 percent of bandwidth used, according to the report.

"Bulk bandwidth applications like P2P are on all day, everyday and are unaffected by changes to network utilization," says Dave Caputo, Sandvine's co-founder. "This reinforces the importance of protecting real-time applications that are sensitive to jitter and latency during times of peak usage."

Do the numbers surprise you? Hit the jump and let us know.

Image Credit: Flickr nrkbeta

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Shocking Study: Over 60% of Internet Upstream Traffic is P2P