Bits come out at night to play

Real-time interactive applications "dominate" peak evening hours between 6:00 and 11:00 p.m, says Sandvine, as people fire up online entertainment-based applications such as gaming, video streaming, social networking and VoIP communications. 

Quoting data from its global Internet traffic trends report, Sandvine says real-time interactive communications increase up to 50 percent per subscriber during the peak evening hours - amazing what you do when the boss isn't looking over your shoulder. Families are spending more of their leisure time on the 'Net looking at YouTube, playing Xbox Live and talking over Skype.

According to the research, P2P "remains dominant" in the upstream direction, accounting for 61 percent of network traffic; it also accounts for more than 22 percent of percent of downstream bandwidth consumption worldwide. P2P traffic per subscriber seems to maintain a relatively high and steady state during times when network are facing their highest volumes of traffic. The report also found web traffic and streaming videos account for 59 percent of downstream bandwidth consumption.

Of course, Sandvine and Comcast do so love talking about P2P.

Sandvine's data was collected between July 1 and Sept. 12, 2008, by analyzing subscriber-anonymous data from more than 16 million broadband subscribers from 26 cable modem and DSL providers in 18 countries across five continents.

For more:
- Read Sandvine's release announcing broadband usage analysis.

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