Exactly 20 years ago we would have told you that a consume more bandwidth uploaded globally is BitTorrent. Since then, however, a slow decline has begun for one of the most well-known and used solutions peer-to-peer for exchanging and distributing files over the network.
Way back in 2004, in the pre-Web 2.0 era, research indicated that BitTorrent was responsible for the 35% of all the Internet traffic. At the time, file sharing via peer-to-peer networks was the main traffic driver as no other service tended to take up such bandwidth.
The king of uploading is no longer BitTorrent: what will change in 2024
Over the last two decades, Internet traffic has literally exploded: the volume of bytes transferred every year has increased dramatically. This trend continues to grow but it is the type of traffic to be radically changed.
The Canadian company Sandvine reveals that in terms of applications the cloud storage and streaming services have taken over. For example, from fixed location Apple iCloud won the gold medal for data volume generated in upload, followed by FaceTime and Google Cloud Storage. On the slope mobile TikTok, Messenger (Meta) and Snapchat dominate.
We underline that in this case we are talking about upload traffic, i.e. data uploaded from user devices to the Internet. It is obvious that with backups on the cloud and the “democratization” in the production of multimedia content, the picture has radically changed compared to a few years ago.
Today, BitTorrent has collapsed to 4% in the case of accesses from fixed locations, on a par with YouTube.
Image taken from “Global Internet Phenomena Report” (Sandvine).
The column Sub. Volume of the Sandvine report indicates the amount of average traffic generated by each user. The values are low and expressed in Megabytes because, obviously, they are compared with the entire volume of data uploaded by any user connected to the Internet and with any application.
Playing with the title of a historic piece of music, one might say: “Video Streaming Killed the Torrent Star“. It is worth noting, however, that not all of the Torrent traffic can be accurately measured.
When users use for example VPN, data exchanged with BitTorrent (as well as any other type of packets) cannot be revealed. However, Sandvine points out that VPN traffic is definitely not among the sources of major upload traffic.