Study: Most Internet traffic bypasses tier-one networks

The majority of Internet traffic now goes through direct peers and does not flow through incumbent tier-one telecom networks, according to a recent report from Arbor Networks, which sells network management and security products.

Tier-one incumbents were once the chief providers of connectivity between content companies like Google and local or regional broadband providers like Comcast. But over time, Google and other content providers have built out their own infrastructure, connecting more directly to end users and bypassing those tier-one intermediaries.

“This is a pretty dramatic shift,” said Craig Labovitz, Arbor’s chief scientist.

The trend coincides with another that Arbor cited in the recent report: the consolidation of companies that control the Internet. About 30 large companies – including Facebook, Google, and Microsoft, which Arbor referred to as “hypergiants” -- control early a third of all Internet traffic today. Whereas two years ago it took more than 5,000 companies to handle just half the world’s Internet traffic, today that volume is controlled by about 150 companies, Arbor said. Google alone controls 7% of the world’s Internet traffic.

“That’s absolutely staggering,” Labovitz said. “In the popular imagination, the Internet is a very democratic network; it’s all about connectivity to thousands of places. In truth these thousands of places are becoming hundreds of places, as content is being consolidated into a shrinking number of very large players.”

Arbor’s data was collected from nearly 3,000 peering routers across 110 large and geographically diverse networks: nine tier-one carriers, 48 tier-twos, and 33 consumer and content providers in the Americas, Asia, and Europe. It was harnessed using a collaborative effort among more than 100 ISPs to share anonymous security, traffic and routing data on an hourly basis.