Almost half of all bandwidth in North America is made up of P2P traffic, according to Sandvine. The company, which develops deep packet inspection equipment to monitor broadband usage, says that P2P traffic is up about three percent from a year ago, going from 41 percent to almost 44 percent. P2P ate up an even larger chunk of upstream traffic, pushing regular old web traffic further down the list.

The report, which Sandvine plans to post on its website today and is recounted at Multichannel News, examines trends in broadband use over time. The company surveyed a number of unnamed "leading service providers" by monitoring traffic at the subscriber level and it concluded that P2P traffic took up a fair amount more bandwidth than web traffic (27.3 percent) and streaming media (14.8 percent). Somewhat surprisingly, VoIP only made up 0.2 percent of traffic.

When narrowing the results down to just upstream traffic, P2P managed to dominate even further. Sandvine claims P2P constituted three-quarters of all upstream traffic, followed at a very distant second by tunneling into private networks (just under 10 percent) and web traffic (9.1 percent).

If true, then P2P traffic does indeed use a significant amount of resources when compared to other Internet services. And it's not too surprising, either—most of what is transferred over P2P is relatively large in terms of file size (music, movies, TV shows, Linux distros). When compared to relatively low-bandwidth items like images and HTML pages, the results make perfect sense.

Still, we should note that Sandvine has an interest in showing that P2P traffic is clogging the tubes. The company sells gear to ISPs that, among other things, helps to throttle Internet traffic based on the needs of its customers. Sandvine was the largely-rumored equipment supplier that enabled Comcast's controversial decision to filter BitTorrent traffic without actually telling any of its users. Sandvine CEO Dave Caputo recently defended network traffic filtering in an interview, calling the concept of net neutrality "laughable." He insisted that all the company wants to do is "improving the quality of the experience of the Internet and trying to make the world a better place."

But Sandvine's data is actually conservative when compared to the data provided by ipoque. The German deep packet inspection gear maker claims that P2P is responsible for as much as 90 percent of all Internet traffic and 95 percent of nocturnal traffic. Ellacoya Networks disagrees, saying that HTTP traffic has passed P2P traffic with the help of streaming media (remember, though, that Sandvine breaks out streaming media into its own category). Either way, the data may provide more ammunition for companies that favor traffic shaping on their networks.