Before BitTorrent became popular, it can be credited for an impressive 35% of all internet traffic as studies indicated a decade ago. Yet, in the years that followed, video streaming was introduced to the public with the launch of YouTube, and Netflix soon after. This resulted to a change in the internet traffic distribution. So in the United States, BitTorrent lost a significant share of the total internet traffic.
More than any other traffic source, BitTorrent is responsible for a quarter of all upstream internet traffic in North America during peak hours according to a new published report by Sandvine. The Canadian broadband management company revealed that during the busiest time of the day, all megabytes can be traced back to torrents.
Although BitTorrent has many legitimate uses, most content being transferred are pirated. This creates problems like copyright infringement. With legal services slowly growing, it’s interesting to see how this trend will improve. Still, with all things considered BitTorrent has remained and arguably more popular now than ever before. And in terms of overall upstream traffic, no other data source can overtake BitTorrent yet.