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Cogent's traffic down 3% in June; Internet transit down to $4-10/megabit
Sunday, 31 August 2008 19:51

“P2P traffic is actually 8.75% lower per day than it was 1 year ago shrinking to 25.93% of total traffic from 35.95% one year ago.”

Cogent's traffic down 3% in June; Internet transit down to $4-10/megabit

The latest data from both cablecos and DSL carriers continues to show traffic growth, but datapoints continue to accumulate suggesting the overall growth rate is declining somewhat.

Cogent is generally the cheapest provider in the U.S., offering gigabit Ethernet at $1,000 month, $10 per megabit. On their conference call, CEO Dave Schaeffer noted, “Traffic did increase in the months of May and April each by about 1% but then in the month of June we saw a significant decline in traffic of approximately 3%. ... we saw a series of video and social networking sites who exhibited much more modest traffic growth than they previously had been exhibiting.”

The Cogent traffic drop is very much an exception although I've lately been hearing that growth of North American traffic is actually dropping. One carrier actually saw bandwidth costs fall in 2007 from 2006.  On the call, Tim Horan asked "Some larger customers that we’ve been speaking to that indicate that the price per megabit is in the $4.00 range now." Schaeffer answered "First of all you’re absolutely correct, our largest customers are at $4.00 a meg and even some of our customers that are not our largest customers can be at that level because to get that price point a customer would enter into a three year contract and they would take a full 10 gig port whether they used it or not.

From Plusnet in the UK comes some confirming data. Dave Tomlinson writes

  • “P2P usage in general is on the decline, streaming is up,”

  • “P2P traffic is actually 8.75% lower per day than it was 1 year ago shrinking to 25.93% of total traffic from 35.95% one year ago.”

  • “Streaming usage is now 168.9% higher per day than it was 1 year ago (3.1TB compared to 1.1TB).

  • Total traffic is 26.5% higher per day than 1 year ago (37.2TB compared to 47TB).

  • YouTube traffic accounts for about 6.5% of the network (across the whole day and night, just download) but at the highest point is now accounting for about 16% of all downloaded traffic on our network.

  • Although some of this might be due to Plusnet traffic shaping, Tomlinson is seeing similar trends from their unshaped customers as well.

Interesting data at http://community.plus.net/blog/2008/07/17/more-record-breaking-streaming-and-the-latest-iplayer-news/ I didn't see his adjustment for more customers, so the differences may be even more dramatic.

We're all guessing until the carriers start giving us answers. Joe Waz of Comcast just told AJC growth was exploding, and I sent a note over asking for the new data and history to compare. Comcast in 2007 grew at 40% per customer, right on the overall growth trend reported by Andrew Odlyzko.