North American Network Operators Group

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Re: Network end users to pull down 2 gigabytes a day, continuously?

  • From: Joe Abley
  • Date: Tue Jan 09 11:06:05 2007



On 8-Jan-2007, at 22:26, Gian Constantine wrote:

My contention is simple. The content providers will not allow P2P video as a legal commercial service anytime in the near future. Furthermore, most ISPs are going to side with the content providers on this one. Therefore, discussing it at this point in time is purely academic, or more so, diversionary.

There are some ISPs in North America who tell me that something like 80% of their traffic *today* is BitTorrent. I don't know how accurate their numbers are, or whether those ISPs form a representative sample, but it certainly seems possible that the traffic exists regardless of the legality of the distribution.


If the traffic is real, and growing, the question is neither academic nor diversionary.

However, if we close our eyes and accept for a minute that P2P video isn't happening, and all growth in video over the Internet will be in real-time streaming, then I think the future looks a lot more scary. When TSN.CA streamed the World Junior Hockey Championship final via Akamai last Friday, there were several ISPs in Toronto who saw their transit traffic *double* during the game.


Joe