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Company Releases Real World Data on File Sharing
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If you want to find out what's happening, just connect to the net. That's what CacheLogic did: it measured P2P file sharing in six Internet hubs around the world.
by Alex Goldman
ISP-Planet Managing Editor
[July 16, 2004]
http://www.isp-planet.com/research/2004/cachelogic_data.html
Privacy advocates say P2P file sharing increases music sales and helps the industry gain exposure for new artists.
The RIAA says that P2P file sharing is theft, occurs largely on college campuses where it harms networks built for education, and harms record companies.
CacheLogic says none of the above, only that P2P file sharing is growing as both legitimate and illegitimate use explode.
The company points to the widespread availability of Red Hat Linux's Fedora product on BitTorrent as a legitimate use of P2P.
CacheLogic has real world data to back up its assertions.
The company recently developed an application monitoring appliance, the Streamsight 510 ((see Examining Layer Seven)), and deployed it in six POPs around the world to measure the extent of P2P traffic in America, Europe, and Asia.
Between January and June of 2004, the products saw KaZaA (which the company calls Fast Track) replaced by BitTorrent as the world's most popular P2P app.
The data also says that over the last mile, P2P traffic is 80 percent or more of all traffic.
The company notes that for systems designed to be asymmetrical (as in most consumer broadband offerings today) the fact that P2P traffic is symmetrical (i.e., P2P users upload as much as they download) causes extra strain on the last mile portion of the ISP's network architecture.
P2P use is widespread, the company's report notes. "In a 30 day period, a single unit of CacheLogic equipment observed P2P accesses from 3.5 million unique IP addresses."
ISPs that operate on the assumption that a few bandwidth hogs cause problems for everyone will be disillusioned if they obtain real data on their network, the company warns.
Rather than fight P2P technology, the company would, of course, prefer that ISPs adopt its Cachepliance system which delivers a more efficient P2P architecture (see Building a Bettter P2P Delivery System).
Unfortunately, as we noted in our article on the Cachepliance system, given the legal assault on all forms of file transfer undertaken by the RIAA, the legality of any solution that gathers data on or assists the operation of P2P file sharing may be subject to the whim of Congress and other lawmakers.
The Streamsight 510 is not illegal, because it does not aid P2P functionality, and it does not trace any individual's activity.
In its report for June, 2004, CacheLogic says that its U.S.-based equipment found that about two-thirds of all traffic was P2P (with about 11 percent HTTP, and 22 percent "other" including e-mail and FTP).
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