After more than four years during which peer-to-peer
(P2P) applications have overwhelmingly consumed the
largest percentage of bandwidth on the network, HTTP (Web) traffic has
overtaken P2P and continues to grow, according to North American data released by solution provider Ellacoya
Networks.
As a
result of streaming audio and video in Web downloads, HTTP now accounts for approximately
46 percent of all traffic on the Internet. P2P continues as a strong second
place at 37 percent of total traffic. Newsgroups (9 percent), non-HTTP video
streaming (3 percent), gaming (2 percent) and VoIP (1 percent) are the next
widely used applications.
Traditional
Web page downloads (text and images) now represent only 45 percent of all Web
traffic, with streaming video representing 36 percent and streaming audio 5
percent of all HTTP traffic. YouTube alone comprises approximately 20 percent
of all HTTP traffic, or nearly 10 percent of all traffic on the Internet. “The
popularity of browser-based video such as YouTube is having a significant
impact not only on overall bandwidth consumption but also on the distribution
of application traffic on the network,” said Fred Sammartino, vice president of
marketing and product management at Ellacoya. “The way people use the Internet
is changing rapidly - from browsing to real-time streaming. We expect to see
new applications over the next year that will accelerate this trend.”
