About $4.1 Billion of U.S. broadband provider capital spending in 2007 was driven specifically by consumer use of peer-to-peer networking, according to MultiMedia Intelligence. That capex burden was slightly down from the $4.2 billion spent in 2006 to support P2P applications.
In 2008, U.S. broadband operators incurred almost $700 million in operating expense as a result of peer-to-peer, or “P2P,” networking, MultiMedia Intelligence estimates.
P2P Internet traffic, despite having grown at a torrid pace for years, will grow nearly 400 percent over the next five years, the firm says, growing from a level of 1.6 petabytes of Internet traffic per month in 2007 to almost 8 petabytes per month by 2012.
One well-known P2P service, BitTorrent, got some virtual ink recently from TMC (News - Alert) Vice President and CTO Tom Keating, who wrote in his blog of an article at the Register that claims that a recent uTorrent decision to use UDP (News - Alert) for P2P file transfers (instead of TCP) to get around ISP “traffic management” restrictions will cause a meltdown of the Internet.
“Poppycock you say?” Keating writes. “It’s worth pointing out that traditionally P2P sharing apps such as Bittorrent, use TCP not UDP. So why would UDP cause VoIP apps to fail? Well for one huge reason, TCP allows for congestion control.”
P2P data currently represents 44 percent of all consumer traffic over the Internet and 33.6 percent in North America. Over 70 percent of that traffic consists of audio and video files, Multimedia Intelligence says.
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Gary Kim (News - Alert) is a contributing editor for TMCnet. To read more of Gary's articles, please visit his columnist page.
Edited by Michael Dinan