BitTorrent usurps Kazaa
p2pnet.net News:- BitTorrent is now the most popular p2p protocol worldwide, says a new study from Britain’s CacheLogic.
“BitTorrent now also replaces KaZaA as the most popular P2P protocol on both a per-continent and worldwide basis,” it says here.
BitTorrent’s traffic has doubled from 26 to 53% of the overall traffic surveyed between January and June of this year, states LightReading here, going on that FastTrack traffic, used by the Kazaa, has “shrunk from 46 to 19 percent over the same time period”.
eDonkey is in the # 2 spot, with Gnutella in 4th place.
Kazaa’s downfall is due largely to two factors:
- Its use of spyware and adware which destroyed its reputation with p2p users, together with owner Sharman Networks’ determined efforts to use DRM to climb into bed with the corporate music industry
- Kazaa ruled at one time, drawing unswerving attention from Big Music which was determined to crush it
Figures from Internet research firm Big Champagne show that last month, 8,324,299 people were on p2p networks at any given moment with one billion files (at a conservative estimate) moving among computers around the world.
In May, 9,279,585 were online at any one time and in April, the figure was 9,473,785.
July 15th, 2004 at 11:46 pm
It’s worth mentioning that CacheLogic measures bandwidth consumed by the various P2P networks, not the number of files downloaded. The Bittorrent “network”, being the best for transferring large files like movies to multiple users, naturally sucks up the most bandwidth since it has the largest average file size by far. But when it comes to total number of file (mainly MP3) downloads, networks like Fasttrack still get the most traffic an a per-file basis. Edonkey occupies middle ground, having both large movie files and much smaller software titles/cracks.
July 16th, 2004 at 11:12 am
Well, the trend goes to fat cable/dsl/E1/T1 connections.
While even in 2000 still most users had 56k, now the fat connections are cheaper and provide MUCH more bandwidth, so ppl can download a full album, not a single song.
The number of files doesn’t matter – at least every 5th file on FastTrack is a fake and every 5th download is corrupted in some way by BayTSP for example. The bandwidth is important – it is the amount of data transferred and it can be split into just mp3s or just apps or just isos etc., but the main point is: more data has been transferred on BitTorrent than on dying KaZaA (should be already at least 1 year before dead – it would be better for all of us.)
Even the number of files on KaZaA is technically irrelevant because you see a very small chunk of the network. If you start klite and land on the klite cluster (which is a second FastTrack network not bigger than 90,000 users), you will get similar results as with the whole network connected.
BT is built in another way and is also not built for tens of thousands of users on a single torrent, but technically (and theoretically), it would also work with 100,000 of users on a single torrent – the only question: will the tracker hold it out?