After more than four years during which peer-to-peer (P2P) applications have overwhelmingly consumed the largest percentage of bandwidth on the network, HTTP (Web) traffic has overtaken P2P and continues to grow says a report released by Ellacoya Networks. These findings are based on usage data of approximately one million broadband subscribers in North America.

As a result of currently increasing use of streaming audio and video in Web downloads, HTTP has risen to approximately 46% of all traffic on the network says the report. P2P continues as a strong second place at 37% of total traffic. Newsgroups (9%), non-HTTP video streaming (3%), gaming (2%) and VoIP (1%) are the next commonly used applications.

Breaking down application types within HTTP, the data reveals the following:

• Traditional webpage downloads (i.e. text and images) represent 45% of all Web traffic.
• Streaming video represents 36%
• Streaming audio 5% of all HTTP traffic

It is also noted that YouTube alone comprises approximately 20% of all HTTP traffic, or nearly 10% of all traffic on the Internet.

Read full story: Business Wire

See related topics: Access Providers, Broadband, P2P, VoIP