Search giant Google is now the largest source of global Internet traffic, taking up six percent of it, according to an article by Information Week. Over 256 exabytes of Internet traffic data were studied over two years in order to produce the report, which was created by Arbor Networks.
The report points out that whilst five years ago, Internet traffic was spread out between thousands of sites, today 60 percent of all Internet traffic is made up of just 100 networks. The report produced by Arbor Networks, but with contributions from the University of Michigan and Merit Networks, shows that peer-to-peer traffic has dropped by 22 percent to a smaller 18 percent, partly due to the rise in popularity of video streaming sites such as Youtube.
HTTP traffic, on the other hand, has seen an almost ten percent boost since 2007, at 52 percent, twenty percent of which is estimated to be video traffic, according to an article by Appfrica.
The report predicts that the cost of data transit will continue to decrease, going from $120/Mbps in 2003 to a predicted $1.20/Mbps in 2014.
Craig Labovitz from Arbor Networks said, "Ten to fifteen years ago it was all about contacting websites, and one of the biggest findings in this report was that there has been a consolidation of websites. Over the past two years larger organisations have been buying up the smaller websites and by July 2009, 30 per cent of the internet was owned by a few large sites."
"This is down to two reasons, the bigger domains on the internet and smaller domains moving into the cloud. This has implications for the user as we are seeing more and more content online while it is getting faster and with better quality."