It is hard to imagine a time in America when we were not as connected as we are today. High speed internet and wi-fi have connected us in amazing ways. A preponderance of society puts their bandwidth to legitimate, legal use. Facebook, Hulu, Netflix and the like carry with them no ethical questions. But what brought us to this point are the largely illegal and ethically questionable uses of the internet, namely piracy and illegal downloading.
At this point in the United States, almost 70% of homes have access to high-speed broadband internet according to a new Pew Internet and American Life survey. That is a staggering number, considering 20% have no internet access at all. High-speed access to digital content is considered almost as ubiquitous as owning a television at this point in our lives, but just over a decade ago, the shoe was on the other foot. According to the same study, in 2000, only 3% of homes had broadband.
Growing at an almost parallel rate has been the increased use of peer-to-peer file sharing, sometimes referred to as P2P. Napster seems like a distant memory at this point, but it was just taking off in October of 1999, when it had 150,000 registered users trading MP3 music files. At its height in February of 2001, it had 26.4 million users. Most of those were college kids, who in some instances were consuming up to 50% of their campus internet system.
At the same time that Napster was exploding, American’s need for data exploded as well. From 1997 to 2000, traffic across internet backbones doubled every year, from between 2,500 to 4,000 terabytes to 20,000 to 35,000 terabytes.
Most of this was driven by illegal file sharing services like Napster. Shut down in July of 2001, it was soon followed by others like Gnutella and another startup, BitTorrent.
BitTorrent was the breakout star of the post-Napster era, pioneering efficiency in sharing large quantities of data. This development allowed more than just MP3s to be shared, and the ability to download different parts of the same file from multiple users contributed to its speed. By 2004, BitTorrent accounted for a whopping 35%of all internet traffic as users shared pirated software, movies, television shows and music via the protocol. At its height it was responsible for 60%.
To really put a fine point on how much illegal downloading has an effect on United States’ bandwidth use, a recent study suggests that while the demand continues to increase at a staggering rate each year, a drop in its use in America has actually provided a measurable slowing of that growth.
Even as it appears that BitTorrent has peaked, analysts theorize that such internet traffic has found another fast lane, via so-called “dark nets” and other sharing options. Increases in capital expenditures by North American telecom providers would also suggest that the increased need for bandwidth is nowhere near slowing down.
It is hard to imagine a time in America when we were not as connected as we are today. High speed internet and wi-fi have connected us in amazing ways. A preponderance of society puts their bandwidth to legitimate, legal use. Facebook, Hulu, Netflix and the like carry with them no ethical questions. But what brought us to this point are the largely illegal and ethically questionable uses of the internet, namely piracy and illegal downloading.
At this point in the United States, almost 70% of homes have access to high-speed broadband internet according to a new Pew Internet and American Life survey. That is a staggering number, considering 20% have no internet access at all. High-speed access to digital content is considered almost as ubiquitous as owning a television at this point in our lives, but just over a decade ago, the shoe was on the other foot. According to the same study, in 2000, only 3% of homes had broadband.
Growing at an almost parallel rate has been the increased use of peer-to-peer file sharing, sometimes referred to as P2P. Napster seems like a distant memory at this point, but it was just taking off in October of 1999, when it had 150,000 registered users trading MP3 music files. At its height in February of 2001, it had 26.4 million users. Most of those were college kids, who in some instances were consuming up to 50% of their campus internet system.
At the same time that Napster was exploding, American’s need for data exploded as well. From 1997 to 2000, traffic across internet backbones doubled every year, from between 2,500 to 4,000 terabytes to 20,000 to 35,000 terabytes.
Most of this was driven by illegal file sharing services like Napster. Shut down in July of 2001, it was soon followed by others like Gnutella and another startup, BitTorrent.
BitTorrent was the breakout star of the post-Napster era, pioneering efficiency in sharing large quantities of data. This development allowed more than just MP3s to be shared, and the ability to download different parts of the same file from multiple users contributed to its speed. By 2004, BitTorrent accounted for a whopping 35%of all internet traffic as users shared pirated software, movies, television shows and music via the protocol. At its height it was responsible for 60%.
To really put a fine point on how much illegal downloading has an effect on United States’ bandwidth use, a recent study suggests that while the demand continues to increase at a staggering rate each year, a drop in its use in America has actually provided a measurable slowing of that growth.
Even as it appears that BitTorrent has peaked, analysts theorize that such internet traffic has found another fast lane, via so-called “dark nets” and other sharing options. Increases in capital expenditures by North American telecom providers would also suggest that the increased need for bandwidth is nowhere near slowing down.
