Does file-sharing account for less than 10% of US net traffic?

Digital Music News ran a story this week suggesting that because "file-sharing now accounts for less than 10% of US internet traffic ... file-sharing volumes are also plunging." But does it?

Does file-sharing account for less than 10% of US net traffic?

Digital Music News ran a story this week hypothesizing that because "file-sharing now accounts for less than 10% of US internet traffic ... file-sharing volumes are plunging."

Two comments on the analysis:

  1. The "file-sharing" referred to is BitTorrent traffic, and there are plenty of other ways of (illegally) sharing content outside BT.
  2. The DMN guys are extrapolating their hypothesis from the wrong data (see source). BitTorrent still accounts for 36.5% of upstream traffic and there must be a client on the other end requesting the data.

What the data shows is that assuming BitTorrent users download small files (music) or less frequently download large files (HD movies), then the downstream traffic will be crushed by Netflix and YouTube.