Internet traffic report: P2P, porn down; games and Flash up P2p-1-thumb-640xauto-2103
For the last several years, German hardware maker ipoque has worked with the ISPs and institutions that have installed its deep packet inspection equipment to track the Internet traffic that flows through it. With the data in hand, the company is in an excellent position to detect trends in usage habits, such as the recent slow-down in the rate of P2P growth. The company is back with its annual report for 2008, which it was kind enough to provide to us. They've made some changes in their analysis that make direct comparisons a bit challenging, but the data shows a bit of a shift away from P2P use, although that shouldn't necessarily comfort content owners.Obviously, ipoque can only draw data from those ISPs that have installed their hardware and agree to participate. There seems to have been good news and bad news in this regard. Australia has apparently dropped off the map as far as data is concerned. Instead, data from South America and Northern and Southern Africa have appeared. Southern Europe got split off into its own category, and Germany is a region unto itself in these figures. For just about all of these regions, there's only data from a single ISP, so any difference in habits between ISPs might skew the results badly, a fact that the report's authors recognize.
More at; http://arstechnica.com/web/news/2009/02/internet-traffic-report-p2p-porn-down-games-and-flash-up.ars