Commentary

David DeJean
 

eDonkey Chews Up The Internet

The Associated Press had an interesting little story the other day that says the file-sharing program eDonkey has taken over the top spot, in terms of packet traffic on the Internet, from BitTorrent. While the article didn't what percentage of all Internet traffic eDonkey accounts for, it noted that the researcher, CacheLogic, had found BitTorrent was the source of "more than 30 percent of all traffic on the Internet" earlier in the year.

The Associated Press had an interesting little story the other day that says the file-sharing program eDonkey has taken over the top spot, in terms of packet traffic on the Internet, from BitTorrent.

While the article didn't what percentage of all Internet traffic eDonkey accounts for, it noted that the researcher, CacheLogic, had found BitTorrent was the source of "more than 30 percent of all traffic on the Internet" earlier in the year.That sounds a little fantastic, doesn't it? Like maybe a reporter didn't get it quite right, maybe CacheLogic meant that 30 percent of all traffic using a particular streaming protocol was BitTorrent file transfers.


More Hardware Insights

White Papers

More >>

Reports

More >>

Webcasts

More >>

But no, when I track it back to the CacheLogic Web site, and through that to a Reuters story on the report, I find a clearer statement: "About 60 percent of the Internet's total bandwidth consists of P2P traffic."

P2P means peer-to-peer, and that means file-sharing. And most of that, according to CacheLogic, is video, and that means movie piracy.

That 60 percent number is huge. How much more does does movie piracy have to grow before begins to impact the level of service on the 'Net, slow things down, keep e-mail, for example, from moving?


Related Reading




Currently we allow the following HTML tags in comments:

Single tags

These tags can be used alone and don't need an ending tag.

<br> Defines a single line break

<hr> Defines a horizontal line

Matching tags

These require an ending tag - e.g. <i>italic text</i>

<a> Defines an anchor

<b> Defines bold text

<big> Defines big text

<blockquote> Defines a long quotation

<caption> Defines a table caption

<cite> Defines a citation

<code> Defines computer code text

<em> Defines emphasized text

<fieldset> Defines a border around elements in a form

<h1> This is heading 1

<h2> This is heading 2

<h3> This is heading 3

<h4> This is heading 4

<h5> This is heading 5

<h6> This is heading 6

<i> Defines italic text

<p> Defines a paragraph

<pre> Defines preformatted text

<q> Defines a short quotation

<samp> Defines sample computer code text

<small> Defines small text

<span> Defines a section in a document

<s> Defines strikethrough text

<strike> Defines strikethrough text

<strong> Defines strong text

<sub> Defines subscripted text

<sup> Defines superscripted text

<u> Defines underlined text

InformationWeek encourages readers to engage in spirited, healthy debate, including taking us to task. However, InformationWeek moderates all comments posted to our site, and reserves the right to modify or remove any content that it determines to be derogatory, offensive, inflammatory, vulgar, irrelevant/off-topic, racist or obvious marketing/SPAM. InformationWeek further reserves the right to disable the profile of any commenter participating in said activities.

Disqus Tips To upload an avatar photo, first complete your Disqus profile. | View the list of supported HTML tags you can use to style comments. | Please read our commenting policy.
T-Shirt Giveaway T-Shirt Giveaway: Each week we're selecting one great comment from our readers. The author of the comment will receive an InformaitonWeek Community t-shirt. So get posting!
Subscribe to RSS

Resource Links