• E-mail this page
• |  Print this page
• | 
• | 
• | 

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.

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.

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?

« Communications Breakdown | Main | This Ain't No Party »