HTTP vs P2P vs NNTP

Ars Technica has some fascinating statistics about current internet traffic patterns:

Ellacoya Networks, makers of deep packet inspection gear for carriers, has pulled together some statistics on one million broadband users in North America, and its findings show that HTTP traffic accounts for 46 percent of all broadband traffic. P2P applications now account for only 37 percent.

Chalk it up to YouTube and other Internet video sharing sites. The surge in HTTP traffic is largely a surge in the use of streaming media, mostly video.

Breaking down the HTTP traffic, Ellacoya says that only 45 percent is used to pull down traditional web pages with text and images. The rest is mostly made up of streaming video (36 percent) and streaming audio (five percent). YouTube alone has grown so big that it now accounts for 20 percent of all HTTP traffic, or more than half of all HTTP streaming video.

Looking over all the numbers, one of the most surprising result is the continued success of NNTP (newsgroups) traffic, which still accounts for nine percent of the total. Clearly, newsgroup discussions (and, ahem, binaries) are still big business.

Given that the average text- and image-based web page is tiny compared with any halfway decent piece of video or audio data, I’m impressed that collectively such ‘traditional’ web pages still account for a whole 45% of traffic.

I wonder how much of that 45% is actually RSS and Atom feeds being polled at regular intervals. This probably doesn’t account for much of the volume, since a well-behaved feed client will look to see whether it gets a 304 response code before trying to grab the whole feed, but it’d be nice to see some numbers to show how far RSS and Atom have taken over some of the load of keeping us up to date with what’s happening on the web.