BitTorrent eats a third of world net traffic

I’ve just came across to new article on BBC (actually, not so new, it was published on Friday) informing about enourmous share of BitTorrent in world internet traffic. Recent estimates say that one third of overall world traffic is based arround BitTorrent. I’m pretty sure that I saw similar survey few months ago which reported over 60% of traffic used by BT, which is actually a pretty huge number. We all know about big popularity of torrents which is still increasing but there is also one group which is particularly not happy about this: internet service providers.

BitTorrent’s efficient use of broadband connections has hugely increased the amount of traffic going across the net, because it runs all users’ net connections flat out to deliver huge files. Some internet service providers think this is unacceptable. Recently BT began clamping down on so-called “broadband hogs”, by starting to enforce a 40GB monthly limit. Some ISPs go even further, breaking down customers’ net usage into different types of activity, and discriminating against bandwidth-hungry file-sharers. So-called traffic-shaping is part of an ongoing battle between ISPs and BitTorrent programmers. As network providers look for smarter ways to identify torrent traffic, and reduce its impact on their network, more and more help sites are springing up showing users how to encrypt their data to avoid it being tracked and controlled.

I’m one of these users, whose ISP has set a data limit to avoid p2p leechers downloading hundreds of gigabytes. Although it may seem not enough for someone, these 40 gigs per month are quite enough for me - if you select only the stuff you will really need and which will not stay unwatched or unused on your drives for month, you should fit into this cap without bigger problems. I know there’s a high number of people downloading every new release, but they never manage to watch or play it - on the other hand, they think they are pretty leet because they have latest stuff into their computers. But back to the topic - BitTorrent is extremely popular way of filesharing and I assume this ratio of p2p traffic will increase in the future quite a lot, not only by few percents…