P2P Traffic to grow almost 400%

P2P Internet traffic, despite having grown at a snail’s pace for years, will increase by almost 400% over the next five years, according to MultiMedia Intelligence. Growing from a level of 1.6 Petabytes of Internet traffic per month in 2007, P2P Internet traffic will grow to almost 8 Petabytes per month by 2012.

A Petabyte is equal to one quadrillion bytes, or 1000 terabytes.

P2P data currently represents 44% of all consumer traffic over the internet and 33.6% in North America. Although the base of legitimate P2P traffic is quite small, it is expected to grow 10 times as fast as illicit P2P traffic. Content owners increasingly see P2P as cost effective way to distribute digital entertainment services and content.

“The awareness of P2P networking grew from the illicit ‘sharing’ of music files, much to the chagrin of content holders,” according to Frank Dickson, chief research officer with MultiMedia Intelligence, in a statement. “Despite the prevailing perceptions of P2P as synonymous with content piracy, P2P is emerging as viable means of distributing legitimate content.”

MultiMedia Intelligence’s new research also found that P2P networking is dominated by music in terms of the number of files transferred. However, in terms of bandwidth, growth of video is explosive. It is largely attributable to a transition to higher quality video and growing video demand in less developed markets.

As the number legitimate P2P services grows, P2P is entering a second- generation evolution. Such next generation P2P services leverage traffic steering or management and includes P4P, P2P caching and hybrid solutions, such as CDN/pseudo CDN services with P2P.