Filesharing accounts for 60% of Internet traffic

Filesharing over peer-to-peer (P2P) networks is one of the many popular Internet applications and a recent study from CacheLogic says P2P accounts for as much as 60 percent of all Internet traffic. Most of this comes from eDonkey, closely followed by BitTorrent.

At the end of 2004, BitTorrent accounted for 30 per cent of all Internet traffic. But after the Motion Picture Association of America's moves to shut down BitTorrent tracking sites, centralized servers for locating distributed content, swappers began moving to other less-publicized services.

Today, eDonkey, a system that uses no centralized servers or tracking sites, consumes the most bandwidth of any application on the Internet, particularly overseas, according to Parker. In the US, Gnutella has seen resurgence in popularity among swappers.

About 62 percent of the files shared through P2P networks is video and 11 percent is audio. The rest are miscellaneous file types. More details can be read at MacWorld