Streaming, Not P2P, Is Fastest-Growing Mobile Bandwidth Hog

Filed in archive Stats on August 12, 2009

Allot Communications recently released its first Global Mobile Broadband Traffic Report - which found, among other things, that streaming, not P2P, is the fastest-growing bandwidth hog on 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... 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," writes Telephony Online's Kevin Fitchard.

"But P2P does affect mobile networks," Ars Technica's Nate Anderson notes. "Though it only accounts for 21 percent of the bandwidth utilization in an average mobile cell, it takes up 42 percent of the bandwidth in the top five percent of utilized cells. In other words, when you look at the cells which experience the most issues with congestion, P2P is one of the prime culprits. When combined with HTTP downloads, 64 percent of the bandwidth in the busiest cells is being used to grab files (compared to 45 percent in the average cell)."

More here from GigaOM ... more here from InternetNews ... more here from MediaPost ... and the press release is here.