New research from German deep packet inspection gear maker Ipoque shows that P2P traffic consumes anywhere between 49 and 89 percent of all Internet traffic in the day. At night, it can spike up to an astonishing 95 percent.

Ipoque gathered over three petabytes of information with the permission of ISPs and universities in Europe, the Middle East, and Australia between August and September this year.

According to Ars Technica:

In Southern Europe, for instance, game downloads account for 25.5 percent of P2P traffic. Movies make up 38.8 percent, while pornography is a mere 1.8 percent. In the Middle East, by contrast, games are downloaded far less (6.3 percent), but movies much more (48 percent). Porn also makes up 5 percent of the traffic.

An interesting trend is the use of encryption in P2P traffic, with up to 20 percent of such traffic falling into this category. Increased attempts to throttle or block P2P will surely force the development and use of more potent encryption or protocol obfuscation.

With the above sample statistics, it is obvious why some ISPs are trying anything from bandwidth throttling to outright throwing heavy users off their networks to conserve bandwidth.

Who do you think will eventually win this cat and mouse game? Will deep inspection technology become so advanced that no amount of encryption or obfuscation will throw them off?

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