Last week, Sandvine provided some facts and figures on the impact the closing of popular storage and back-up service Megaupload had on networks across the globe.

With the media and legal spotlight being shined on this traffic category in recent days, a number of competing sites have either decided to shut themselves down, or dramatically alter the way files are uploaded or downloaded from their servers.

One such service to make such a drastic change was FileSonic, who has halted any new uploads, and is only allowing users to download their personal files. Read the rest of this entry »

In 2002, when Sandvine published our first Global Internet Phenomena Report, we revealed the groundbreaking news P2P traffic was the dominant source of internet traffic, in a time when many thought it was e-mail and web surfing.  Since then we’ve tracked the rise and fall of different applications and announced the arrival of an on-demand mentality.

Nine years later, after completing another round of comprehensive traffic analysis, we’re back with our Global Internet Phenomena Report: Spring 2011 and are ready to share more insights about how subscriber habits are shaping the make-up of Internet traffic, including how Real-Time Entertainment continues its path towards network dominance and how rumours of P2P Filesharing’s demise have been greatly exaggerated.

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Wired magazine recently asked us for information about P2P Filesharing traffic in North America.  In response, we provided a figure from our Fall 2010 Global Internet Phenomena report which shows that P2P Filesharing was 19.2% of aggregate traffic during peak period on North America’s fixed access networks.

Wired also approached another vendor with experience in traffic identification, and it seems that there is a sizeable discrepancy between the two responses that the magazine received and reported on (8% was reported by Arbor Networks). What could cause such differing figures?

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In August 2009, the upstream provider of thepiratebay was forced to disconnect the popular tracker site. Now, this is one of many tracker sites (but a popular one). What effect would this have on Bittorrent globally? Sandvine did a short analysis and concluded that the effect was quite noticeable, a ~15-20% drop in overall bandwidth. You can read more detail [here], but the interesting thing is: bandwidth and applications are fickle and unstable. One applications 20% drop could be just as easily a 50% increase in another. When you are talking about the overall top applications, this can significantly skew the quality of experience and capital requirements for a broadband service provider.