The "Death Of P2P" Is Relative, Possibly Wrong - Rise in encryption makes P2P's trajectory hard to track...Rise in encryption makes P2P's trajectory hard to track... 01:45PM Thursday Oct 22 2009 by Karl Bode tags: Fileswapping · business · stats · world · networking In the past few weeks, two different Internet traffic studies from Cisco and Arbor networks have indicated that P2P's overall Internet capacity consumption is down. Or more accurately, that P2P's slice of the Internet capacity pie is starting to be dwarved by quickly growing video consumption. Cisco's study (which we covered yesterday) pretty clearly indicates this relativity, but Arbor's indicated that P2P traffic had "declined dramatically, leading to reports that P2P was "dying." Of course GigaOM (via Techdirt) notes this relativity, but there's something else in the piece that seems more pertinent: "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. In other words, Arbor indicates that as ISPs crack down harder on P2P use, more P2P users are using encryption and as such can't be tracked. That would seem to suggest the numbers may not only be relative -- they may be completely wrong. |