What SA’s ADSL users do on the Internet
Cybersmart has revealed that most traffic on its network is used for website visits (http and https), video streaming, and peer to peer (P2P) services.
Cybersmart CEO Laurie Fialkov said that their biggest bandwidth consumption during business hours comes from web services (37%) and video streaming (30%).
This changes during off-peak hours when video streaming consumes most bandwidth (35%), followed by P2P (23%) and web services (22%).
“We are starting to see a similar kind of profile to that of overseas ISPs where streaming is generating the biggest network demand,” said Fialkov.
Good news for ISPs is that video streaming can be supported by good caching strategies. This is unfortunately not the case for many P2P services.
To alleviate the impact of P2P services on its ADSL network, Cybersmart limits P2P bandwidth to 15% of their total capacity during business hours and 23% during off-peak times.
“P2P has double the contention of everything else, so if we took off the limits, it would require more than 30% of the total capacity,” said Fialkov.
Breakdown of ADSL network traffic
The full breakdown of Cybersmart’s ADSL network traffic during business hours and off-peak periods is as follows.
| ADSL Traffic during business hours | |
| HTTP and HTTPs | 37% |
| Streaming | 28% |
| P2P | 15% (limited) |
| Software updates | 8% (limited) |
| Skype and equivalent | 4% |
| 3.5% | |
| Gaming | 3% |
| VPA, L2TP, IPSEC | 1.5% |
| Other | 1% |
| ADSL Traffic after hours | |
| HTTP and HTTPs | 22% |
| Streaming | 35% |
| P2P | 23% (limited) |
| Software updates | 10% (limited) |
| Skype and equivalent | 4% |
| 1% | |
| Gaming | 4% |
| VPA, L2TP, IPSEC | 0.5% |
| Other | 0.5% |
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