Carrier net management vendor says P2P is more like 20% of traffic

When you have a small number of competitors in a business, like the US has in the broadband access business, providers tend to create artificial scarcity and ration service. It’s almost a natural law. another one of those oddly natural laws is the 80 / 20 rule. 80% of users of any product will use 20% of a resource and 20% will use 80% of a resource. I matters not if it’s free refills on coffee, or the beer that is bought and paid for by the bottle, it holds true for both. It’s also true of bandwidth usage and should be expected by providers as a normal metric of their business.

Om Malik recently interviewed Danny McPherson, CTO of Arbor Networks, a supplier of network-management and traffic-shaping tools to carriers. You would think he would naturally concur with the Comcast line that the majority of traffics is peer to peer, but his data includes some very unexpected numbers:

The P2P stats are the ones that came as a complete surprise. Like you, I have read many reports that suggest P2P applications account for the majority of the traffic on high-speed networks. But McPherson’s data suggests otherwise:

• 20 percent of traffic is P2P applications
• During peak-load times, 70 percent of subscribers use http while 20 percent are using P2P
• Http still makes up the majority of the total traffic, of which 45 percent is traditional web content that includes text and images. Streaming video and audio content from services like YouTube accounts for nearly 50 percent of the http traffic. It shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone — streaming TV shows from Hulu and videos from YouTube have been on a major upswing, as noted by our colleagues over on NewTeeVee. (GigaOm)

It would seem that the 80 / 20 rule also applies to P2P traffic. As for the bandwidth “hogs”, Telcos have been building network capacity using the 80 / 20 rule since the days of the rotary telephone. The cable guys should certainly understand this as well since they’ve also been fixed line voice providers for over a decade.

Providing bandwidth becomes exponentially cheaper every year, but it does require a commitment to invest proportionally in plant and equipment to keep up with increasing demand. If you have little competition it’s easier and cheaper to create scarcity and ration. The creation of mythology like networks being overwhelmed by illicit P2P traffic is part and parcel of creating the scarcity myth.