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.

The graph above compares several of the leading storage and back-up services in North America and how their traffic fared both before and after Megaupload was shut down. 

What is interesting is that before FileSonic stopped allowing downloads at approximately 18:00h (UTC-5) on January 22^nd, it was the clear front-runner application, generating significantly more traffic on this network than any of its competitors (prior to the Megaupload shutdown, the two appeared roughly equal).

We will be keeping a keen eye on further changes to these storage and back-up services, and will be sure to provide an update if anything significant develops.  For more information on Sandvine’s Internet traffic trends, visit our Global Internet Phenomena Report.

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.

Additionally, this time around we’ve released more than just the global report.  I’m happy to announce that we’ve released Global Internet Phenomena Spotlight studies on three regions:

• Europe (Fixed Access)
• Latin America (Mobile Access)
• North America (Fixed Access)

These spotlights are a direct response to the overwhelming response we get every year for deeper analysis of each region.

Similarly, we frequently receive requests for granular examination of particular Internet trends and applications.  Most recently, we made news with our Global Internet Phenomena Spotlight: The Royal Wedding.  In a similar vein, in conjunction with the Spring 2011 study we’re releasing two additional application spotlights:

• Netflix Rising
• March Madness On Demand

We’d love to hear your feedback – what do you think of these spotlight reports?  What other topics would you like to see in the future?

I sincerely hope you have as much fun reading these as we had writing them, and that they’re as instructive for you as they were for us!

See our Spring Report video:  http://www.youtube.com/sandvine#p/u/0/Qtsh1GRxzNM

Check out our Social Media Press Release:  http://www.marketwire.com/press-release/sandvines-spring-2011-global-internet-phenomena-report-reveals-new-internet-trends-tsx-svc-1515256.htm

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?

The difference is that Sandvine’s traffic identification technology breaks BitTorrent into four sub-protocols, which are summed together as “BitTorrent” in our Global Internet Phenomena reports.  When BitTorrent first debuted, we differentiated between “BitTorrent” (hereafter referred to as “BitTorrent (regular)” and “BitTorrent (UDP)”.  As encryption techniques appeared, we responded by recognizing this traffic as “BitTorrent (encrypted)”.  Finally, when uTorrent popularized the uTP protocol, we introduced a “BitTorrent (uTP)” recognizer.  On North America’s fixed access networks, BitTorrent breaks down as shown in the pie chart – figure 1.  This breakdown is fairly consistent throughout the day, although the absolute levels of BitTorrent vary as shown in figure 2 below.

BitTorrent typically represents about 90% of all P2P Filesharing traffic; consequently, in the Fall of 2010 BitTorrent accounted for roughly 17.3% (90% of 19.2%) of aggregate traffic in North America’s evening hours.  Breaking this down into the sub-protocols yields the following shares of total traffic:

• BitTorrent (regular) – 6.3%
• BitTorrent (uTP) – 6.7%
• BitTorrent (encrypted) – 2.9%
• BitTorrent UDP – 1.4%

Of these constituent parts, “BitTorrent (regular)” and “BitTorrent (UDP)” are trivial to identify, whereas the encrypted and uTP varieties require very sophisticated traffic identification techniques.  Perhaps this reality can explain the discrepancy between the numbers provided by Sandvine and those provided by other organizations.  It’s possible that our P2P Filesharing numbers (which included all varieties of BitTorrent) were being compared against only the easily-detected protocols.  In fact, if you sum together our numbers for “BitTorrent (regular)” and “BitTorrent UDP”, you get a figure of 7.7%, quite close to the 8% reported by Arbor Networks.

Figure 1

Figure 2