Who pays for your P2P habit? ISPs or you?

Who’s paying for peer-to-peer traffic across the Internet? It’s not the largest ISPs, which can actually profit from such traffic, but smaller regional Internet providers and those who operate campus or corporate networks, according to a new paper out that studies how P2P applications affect ISPs. The paper claims to look at the whole ecosystem, across network boundaries and geographical borders to detail the effect of the entire system of files.

Some of the results are surprising:

• A third of BitTorrent traffic stays local: Thirty-two percent of BitTorrent traffic stays in the country of origin and 49 percent of traffic is intra-domain or crosses a single peering or sibling network link.
• BitTorrent traffic doesn't usually hit the big backbone transit providers: That’s partly because it stays local and partly because the largest amount of BitTorrent traffic stays inside a local area network run by a hosting company or enterprise.
• BitTorrent traffic occurs at the same time as peak web traffic and it’s growing: The old myth that BitTorrent users were up late at night seeding files has evolved and most users are sharing files during the day. Many are doing so during “peak traffic times,” which the researchers don't disclose unless daytime means peak traffic time.