Internet Study 2008/2009

The Impact of P2P File Sharing, Voice over IP, Instant Messaging, One-Click Hosting and Media Streaming on the Internet

For the Internet Study 2008/2009 ipoque‘s ISP and university customers agreed to provide anonymized traffic statistics collected by PRX Traffic Managers installed in their networks. The regional coverage has been extended to include eight regions of the world. Last year’s study covered the five regions Australia, Eastern Europe, Germany, the Middle East and Southern Europe. The additional regions are Northern and Southern Africa, South America and Southern Europe. The study includes statistical data about popularity and user behavior for all common network protocols. This covers most applications used in today’s Internet such as Web browsing, media streaming, P2P file sharing, one-click file hosting, instant messaging, Internet telephony and online games.

Some of the key findings of the study are:

• P2P generates most traffic in all regions
• The proportion of P2P traffic has decreased BitTorrent is still number one of all protocols, HTTP second
• The proportion of eDonkey is much lower than last year
• File hosting has considerably grown in popularity
• Streaming is taking over P2P users for video content
• Usenet, a file sharing alternative for P2P, appears in the statistics for the first time