P2P Remains Alive and Well, BitTorrent Surging

Preliminary results of a study on peer-to-peer file sharing show that on the average, the technology still makes up anywhere between 50 and 90 percent of Internet traffic, with BitTorrent surging in popularity.

The full results of the study will be released at the Emerging Technologies Conference to be held September 25-27 at MIT. Even though P2P dominates much of the bandwidth on the Internet, other technologies have begun to make their mark.

For example, Skype now makes up as much as two percent of all traffic on some networks, even though it uses relatively little bandwidth. Media streaming sites like YouTube, and file hosting services have also seen increases in bandwidth usage.

On the P2P side, BitTorrent leads the pack with anywhere from 50 to 75 percent share of the market. However, in some locales, eDonkey pulls even with BitTorrent, although its share varies widely as well -- anywhere from 5 to 50 percent.

"In certain regions, other protocols have gained a significant importance. In the Baltic States, for instance, DirectConnect has a proportion of about 30% of P2P," research firm iPoque said, who sponsored the study.

The company's 2006 survey was the first of its kind to extensively study the bandwidth usage of P2P networks. At that time, they were also able to confirm that the BitTorrent and eDonkey actively traded copyright material, and anywhere from 20 to 30 percent of pornography traffic came from those two services.