Ellacoya: Top 20% of Broadband Users Consume 97% of Bandwidth

Peer-to-peer (P2P) traffic remains the most bandwidth intensive application and a handful of subscribers continue to consume disproportionate amounts of total network bandwidth, according to a new study of European broadband subscriber and application usage conducted by Ellacoya Networks.


Ellacoya conducted the study between August 25, 2005 and September 2, 2005, continuously monitoring the network activity of more than one million subscribers in Europe using its IP Service Control System. The Ellacoya system uses Deep Packet Inspection (DPI) technology to identify and classify applications on a per-subscriber basis and provides detailed reports on network, subscriber and application activity.


Some top level findings include


Bandwidth Distribution by Subscriber


Bandwidth usage reporting by subscriber showed that usage by the top most active 5% of subscribers represented approximately 56% of total bandwidth, while the top 20% of active subscribers consumed more than 97% of total bandwidth. The remainder of the subscriber base, approximately 80%, consumed less than 3% of total bandwidth.


Bandwidth Distribution by Application


Peer-to-peer (P2P) was by far the largest consumer of bandwidth with 65.5% of traffic on the network being P2P applications. Web surfing (HTTP) consumed 27.5% of bandwidth, while Newsgroups traffic consumed approximately 2.3%. The remaining 4.7% percent of traffic comprised streaming audio and video applications, VoIP, gaming, Instant Messaging, e-mail and FTP applications, each consuming less than 1% of total bandwidth.


Applications with the Most Simultaneously Active Subscribers:


A measure of the most popular applications on the network revealed that Web surfing (HTTP), with average daily peaks at 50% of subscribers, was the most popular application. Instant Messaging (IM), with average daily peaks at 25% of subscribers, was the second most popular application; while Peer-to-Peer (P2P), with average daily peaks at 18% of subscribers, was third. E-mail (SMTP), with average daily peaks at 12%, was the fourth most popular application. The remaining applications each measured less than 10% of simultaneous subscribers at its daily peak.
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