Thanks to YouTube alone consuming some 10% of all internet traffic, P2P traffic is now down to only 36% of internet usage in North America.

After more than four years of P2P and file-sharing programs consuming the largest percentage of bandwidth on the network traffic in North America, HTTP, general web, traffic has overtaken P2P and continues to grow.

Due to the increasing demand for streaming audio and video in Web downloads, HTTP is now responsible for some 46% of all traffic. P2P continues as a strong second place at 37% of total traffic. Newsgroups at 9%, non-HTTP video streaming at 3%, gaming at 2%, and VoIP at 1% round out the list of application bandwidth usage.

It’s interesting to note how this news will hopefully change the mindset of ISPS in North America who have either already been throttling P2P traffic or were considering doing so since it was previously responsible for some 70% of all bandwidth usage.

Now, with online video streaming alone up 56% since last year, and the constant rise in the number of broadband and wi-fi connections making it possible, the amount of bandwidth usage attributed to HTTP traffic versus P2P traffic will only grow even greater.

Zeropaid.com