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October 02, 2004
Decentralized Filesharing Is Huge
Cachelogic Research paints an interesting picture of decentralized filesharing.
The most astonishing item is that global Internet traffic analysis in June 2004 revealed that in the United States peer-to-peer represents roughly two-thirds of traffic volumes, and in Asia peer-to-peer represents more than four-fifths of traffic volumes. By comparison, HTTP is less than a tenth of the traffic in Asia and less than a sixth of the traffic in the United States. CacheLogic calls peer-to-peer the killer application for broadband with a global reach and a global user base.
Perusing the architectures and protocols section of CacheLogic's site we find a table comparing the characteristics of web traffic (HTTP) with those of common peer-to-peer protocols. They point out that first generation p2p systems were centralized like Napster; second generation p2p systems were decentralized like Gnutella; and now
The third generation architecture is a hybrid of the first two, combining the efficiency and resilience of a centralized network with the stealth characteristics of distributed/decentralised network. This hybrid architecture deploys a hierarchical structure by establishing a backbone network of SuperNodes (or UltraPeers) that take on the characteristics of a central index server. When a client logs on to the network, it makes a direct connection to a single SuperNode which gathers and stores information about peer and content available for sharing.
Recent developments in peer-to-peer include dynamic port selection and bidirectional streaming of download traffic in the most popular peer-to-peer applications in 2004, BitTorrent (more useful thanks to many available BitTorrent clients and DV Guide) and eDonkey (and eMule). BitTorrent is by traffic the most popular peer-to-peer application:
BitTorrent's dominance is likely to be attributed to two factors: the rise in popularity of downloading television programmes, movies and software; and the size of these files - a MP3 maybe 3-5Mb while a BitTorrent often sees files in excess of 500Mb being shared across the Peer-to-Peer network.The high usage of eDonkey in Europe can be attributed to the fact that the eDonkey interface is available in a number of different languages - French, German, Spanish, etc.
So even though the hype machine has stopped pumping p2p, the quieter revolution of the last few years has shown that peer-to-peer traffic has steadily grown to a majority of the Internet traffic worldwide.
Posted by adam at October 2, 2004 01:37 PM