P2P Remains Dominant Protocol

An anonymous reader writes "Last week, a press release was issued by Ellacotya that suggested something quite startling — HTTP (Hyper Text Transfer Protocol, aka Web traffic) had for the first time in four years overtaken P2P traffic. However a new article from Slyck disputes this, and contends that P2P remains the bandwidth heavyweight."

Nitpicking

[TorKlingberg]

P2P is not one protocol, but many. Some P2P systems, such as Gnutella, even use HTTP for file transfers.

Than means NOTHING

[Anonymous Coward]

P2P (which is a class of applications, not a specific protocol) was created to deal with huge files. Of course it will generate a lot of traffic. Duh!

conflict of interest

[Anonymous Coward]

Ellacoya are well-known for selling routers optimised (and I use that word with the kind of looseness only Goatse man can convey) for bandwidth shaping, in particular for throttling P2P. PlusNet [plus.net] were one of the first ISPs in the UK to be hated for widespread deployment [atlasventure.com] of their kit.

Remember, a press release is almost always marketing; and this form of marketing is about getting people to purcahse solutions for problems that don't quite exist as described. (Microsoft are good at this; Google are first rate.)

Re:If I was designing a P2P network today

[diamondsw]

It'd be http based. Not for efficiency or any technical reason, but because it's the best camouflage.

Welcome to layer 5-7 packet inspection on modern firewalls. You're screwed.