Streaming surpassing P2P in clogging mobile networks

Peer-to-peer has always been viewed as the prime culprit in network congestion in mobile broadband, but a new high-bandwidth perpetrator is starting to make its debut, streaming multimedia. According to data collected by Allot Communications, HTTP streaming was the fastest growing application in in terms of mobile bandwidth usage in the second quarter and accounted for nearly a quarter of world’s 3G network traffic.

Crunching data Allot has collected from operators using its deep packet inspection technology, Allot found that streaming video and audio is now equal to or greater than P2P mobile traffic in all regions of the world and definitely growing at a faster clip. In the second quarter, P2P traffic globally grew 10% while, streaming traffic grew a whopping 60% in just 3 months. That’s not necessarily bad news for operators, though, said Jonathon Gordon, direct of marketing for Allot.

Unlike P2P usage, which is disproportionately in the hands of just a few users, streaming traffic is more evenly distributed among mobile users. Allot found that in the most congested cells, the majority of P2P traffic was concentrated on just one or two users in the cell, usually the top one or two users. In fact, P2P usage is so unevenly distributed that it was the presence of P2P applications that often caused a cell to become congested. The top 5% of cells by bandwidth utilization saw P2P account for 42% of all traffic, while the average cell saw only half of that.

“It’s a small amount of subscribers that are generating a large amount of traffic,” Gordon said, yet they’re often paying the same subscription fees as customers using a fraction of their bandwidth. In general, these tend to be customers that are using 3G data cards the same way they would use a DSL or cable connection. “In areas where we see congestion, it looks very similar to a fixed network,” Gordon said. “It seems many customers are using wireless broadband as a straight swap for fixed broadband.”