During NANOG47, Craig Labovitz and his colleagues unveiled a new study about the traffic distribution in the Internet.

In contrast with most scientific studies that analyses Internet traffic from a few measurement points, this study was able to analyse statistics coming from more than 110 ISPs for a total aggregated throughput of 14 Tbps. The major findings of this study are :

• content is more and more served by content distribution networks or specialised data centers, content distribution networks such as limelight or akamai produce 10% of the total traffic
• 150 origin AS numbers contribute more than 50% of the total traffic. There are more larger traffic sources than in the past (two years ago, the top 2000+ ASNs was only producing 50% of the traffic)
• applications are more and more running on top of http and flash with the browser serving as the default application deployment platform
• large content sources (google, yahoo, facebook, microsoft, ...) peer directly with their customers, bypassing Tier-1 providers
• google is one of the fastest growing AS in terms or traffic. It generates now 6% of the total traffic
• peer-to-peer is still strong, but not growing anymore