BitTorrent accounts for 50-75 percent of P2P traffic

ipoque presented some of the results of its P2P survey at the Emerging Technology Conference last week. The firm estimates P2P traffic accounts for 50 to 90 percent of all Internet traffic.

The most popujlar P2P protocol is BitTorrent, the researchers say BitTorrent surpassed eDonkey as the most popular network by dominating the P2P traffic with a 50-75 percent share.

eDonkey exhibits a regionally varying popularity with shares between 5-50% of all P2P. 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.

As P2P continues to dominate, other applications have risen in popularity. While Joost does not yet cause the traffic volume many Internet providers fear, Skype, although being a low-bandwidth application, generates up to 2% of the overall traffic in certain networks. Media streaming services, such as YouTube, and one-click file hosting services, like Rapidshare and Megaupload, which provide direct download links as a means to distribute content using ad-financed Web server farms, have also seen a huge popularity surge. Details will be published with release of the 2007 survey.

ipoque's 2006 P2P survey provided the globally first statistics about the exchanged content in file sharing networks. Detailed data acquisition and analysis was conducted by ipoque for the eDonkey and BitTorrent networks. The results showed, for instance, a 20% and 30% share of pornographic content in for BitTorrent respectively eDonkey and confirmed that many current audio, ebook and movie titles are exchanged.