Real-time video surpasses P2P, creating new broadband ‘prime-time’

Broadband is going prime-time.

That’s the message from a new report today from deep packet inspection vendor Sandvine, which analyzed traffic from 20 networks and more than 24 million subscribers to find that the heaviest use of broadband networks has shifted to viewing streaming video – and primarily between the traditional prime-time hours of 7-10 pm.

That finding, along with a concurrent shift away from heavy P2P users being the biggest consumers of broadband bandwidth, represents a major shift in bandwidth consumption. It also has major implications for network service providers and how they manage their traffic, made even more complex thanks to the heavy interest in net neutrality these days in Washington, D.C.

It also comes as similar surveys from Cisco and Arbor Networks in recent days have been released with similar conclusions: overall bandwidth consumption is increasing, with streaming slowly overtaking P2P.

The Sandvine report – the “2009 Global Broadband Phenomena” – is based on live traffic running on more than 20 of its DSL and cable customer networks spanning five regions including North America, Europe, Caribbean and Latin America, Asia-Pacific and the Middle East and Africa. Traffic was measured during September of this year. It was captured anonymously (not even IP addresses were collected) and captured on a bits per second per protocol basis. The report is the sixth one Sandvine has released since 2002.

In the most notable development, real-time entertainment traffic – including video and audio streaming and Flash media mainly – accounted for 26.6 percent of total traffic, up from 12.6 percent the previous year. That percentage grew to 32.8 percent during peak evening hours.

Meanwhile, peer-to-peer traffic fell from a 32% share of all aggregate traffic in Sandvine’s 2008 survey, to 20 percent in 2009.

“The world has shifted in just one year. It’s done it slowly but surely, but it’s a dramatic shift when you take these two snapshots in time [from one report to the next],” said Dave Caputo, Sandvine co-founder, president and CEO. “The way people are using the Internet right now, they want to watch a streaming video of their favorite show and they want it right now. It’s a shift away from download now, enjoy it later to entertain me right now.”

The download now, watch later phrase is a clear reference to P2P and especially BitTorrent traffic, which has traditionally been blamed as a significant drain on network bandwidth. In particular, the industry has typically blamed a handful of P2P bandwidth abusers for consuming an out-of-proportion amount of traffic – a charge that was echoed many times last week by keynoters at the Supercomm show in Chicago.

However, traffic consumption dynamics may be changing. During peak usage hours – which Sandvine found to be 7-10 pm in most time zones – high amounts of video streaming and other high-bit traffic was consumed by a broad swath of users, not just P2P users. In fact, P2P users today tend to shift their downloads to off hours, actually putting less strain on carrier networks, Sandvine’s Caputo said.

“Peer-to-peer is still growing in absolute terms. But what we’re seeing as a percentage of traffic is that real-time entertainment has surpassed it,” Caputo said, adding that with the wide adoption of streaming services like Hulu.com, “we’re all becoming bandwidth hogs now,” especially during peak usage hours.

While not necessarily a huge bandwidth consumer, real-time voice applications like voice over IP or chatting via gaming networks are also high during peak times.

The challenge for service providers is that users of real-time apps are much more aware of service degradations – such as delays in video streaming or distortions in voice calls – than P2P users, who simply have to wait a little longer for a file to download.

“It’s going to be more and more important for service providers to deliver a personalized service offering to subscribers where they’ll be able to prioritize during moments of congestion what’s more important to them,” Caputo said. “I believe every one of those subscribers will choose to prioritize for latency- and jitter-sensitive traffic” – ultimately even paying for the ability to secure delivery of their real-time streams. That could lead to the end of all-you-can eat broadband and a move toward more metered or time-of-day-billing parameters on the network.

This seemingly profound change in data traffic patterns comes as the FCC considers new Net Neutrality rules, which call for treating data equally on the network. The rules, first proposed last week, recognize the need for service providers to manage traffic on their networks. It will be interesting to see if new data like the Sandvine report – which moves away from some core traffic assumptions in areas like P2P usage – will have a significant impact on that debate.

An executive summary of the report can be found at the Sandvine Web site.