Replying to myself feels a little narcissistic...
The growth is all in video - and the majority of that video goes in one direction only.
This reminded me of a great picture I saw a few years ago, courtesy of Wired.com
It shows how the makeup of content flowing over the US portion of the internet has changed over the years 1990-2010.
Attached below, and full story here:
http://www.wired.com/2010/08/ff_webrip/FTP was king in 1990
WWW was king in 2000
P2P was king in 2005
Video was king in 2010
Its a shame the graph stops there, because video was only really starting to get a head of steam in 2010. Time for a new one, Wired?
Remember P2P and traffic management? In 2005, P2P was set to kill ISPs' bandwidth, because it ate through as much as it possibly could - hence all the traffic management around this time. Traffic graphs from Plusnet showed that overnight, P2P consumed as much bandwidth as all the daytime services combined.
Nowadays, the peak happens because of video. And that stuff can't be easily time-shifted away.
I managed to find a report that continues on from the Wired one, telling us what volumes look like today - but only for peak hours, rather than accumlated over 24hrs.
https://www.sandvine.com/downloads/general/global-internet-phenomena/2014/2h-2014-global-internet-phenomena-report.pdfAnd, according to that, streamed video and audio accounts for 68%; Netflix alone accounts for 35% of the peak-hour traffic in the US.
European volumes are different, with streaming accounting for 42% on average - but varying between 20% and 67% depending on country. It seems some countries over here can match the US, based on availability of things like iPlayer and Netflix.
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