What are people actually doing on the internet?

May 29, 2008 12:18 PM

What are people actually doing on the internet?

I'm looking for some good data about what people are doing on the internet broken down by protocol with preferably additional details. So something like: 20% of traffic is HTTP, 10% is SSL, 40% is P2P, 2% is NNTP and so on.

The additional detail would be identifying things like the type of P2P traffic (Bittorrent, Gnutella, etc), or the amount of HTTP traffic going to video sites. A breakdown by type of users (like Home users vs Business users vs College users) would be most useful.

I've found some very limited, very old data as well as something a little more recent, but I need more detail and a more representative sample.

posted by quiet to computers & internet (5 comments total)

akamai has some good data
posted by zeoslap at 12:30 PM on May 29, 2008

This report (from June 2007) says that "YouTube alone comprises approximately 20% of all HTTP traffic, or nearly 10% of all traffic on the Internet." which is pretty incredible.
posted by null terminated at 12:37 PM on May 29, 2008

Don't forget spam & porn. :)

The best snapshot I have is of my public wifi network at a sports arena/convention center. HTTP makes up about 70% of the traffic (Software updates/Youtube/Facebook/Myspace make up about 50% of the bandwidth), P2P makes up about 15%, everything else (SSL, RDP, etc) would be 15%.

The worst was when they held college graduations there. So many #$%#$% iPhones all on Facebook and YouTube that they were saturating a 24Mbps down pipe. The only other thing like it was when the circus was in town, but they had >100 people with laptops & xboxes, but a much wider variety of traffic.
posted by OTA at 1:29 PM on May 29, 2008 [1 favorite has favorites]

Percentage of p2p protocols
posted by jouke at 2:01 PM on May 29, 2008

Traffic != Doing.

I'm sure most people aren't spending time actively watching their downloads, so you have a more simple breakdown of - Web browsing, e-mail, or IM/chat.
posted by wongcorgi at 2:46 PM on May 29, 2008