Some people NEED change NOW: World Wide, Web Surfing Down as Entertainment, P2P Dominate Global Internet Usage

Friday, 5 November 2010

World Wide, Web Surfing Down as Entertainment, P2P Dominate Global Internet Usage

As people look more to real-time entertainment and social networks, web browsing is on the decline everywhere, except in Europe - the only part of the world, according to the study, that also saw a decline year-over-year in P2P traffic.

North America

Real-time entertainment is the largest contributor to data consumption in North America on both fixed and mobile networks, accounting for 43% of peak period traffic on the former and 41% on the latter. This is up from 30% less than a year ago. And as we've reported here before, Netflix alone constitutes more than 20% of downstream traffic during that time-frame.

P2P file-sharing remains popular in North America, but it has seen a dramatic decline on mobile networks. Even so, it still accounts for a whopping 53.3% of upstream capacity on fixed networks. In other words, we leave our PCs on at home for P2P, and don't bother with file-sharing on our smartphones.

Latin America

Although Latin America still has a relatively low level of Internet penetration, many new subscribers are opting for mobile, rather than fixed network access. Unlike the North America market, where these two methods of accessing seem to lead to slightly different Internet usage, in Latin America Internet users seem to behave similarly whether they're wireless or wired.

Asia-Pacific

The median monthly data consumption in this region occurring over fixed networks is roughly 12 GB. That's compared with about 4 GB per month in North America.

Europe

The top four applications driving European upstream traffic are BitTorrent (30%), HTTP (23%), PPLive (12%), and Skype (9%). The latter is significantly higher than in North America and the Asia-Pacific, where Skype is roughly 3% of upstream traffic.

Photo credits: NASA Goddard Space Flight Center

See Also

As LimeWire Shuts Its Doors, Other P2P Clients See a Surge in Usage

Court Orders LimeWire to Shut Its File-Sharing Doors

Gene Simmons Threatens Anonymous, Responds to DDoS Attacks Against His Site

Google Tests Mind Reading, AKA Full Page Previews

If you would like to learn more about the real-time Web, check out our premium report, The Real-Time Web and its Future, to give you a jump-start in this new direction the Web is moving in.