Peer-to-Peer (p2p) network architectures have been around for decades and are a robust field of study in many computer science departments throughout the world. Commercial p2p content delivery services are a relatively new phenomenon, especially those powered by WebRTC which don’t require end users to install client software. But, as demand for streaming services explodes worldwide, the thirst for content delivery capacity has also grown exponentially. With traditional server-based CDNs struggling to handle the load, broadcasters are turning to p2p content delivery more and more.

As the Serverless CDN, Peer5 has unique insight into this transition. People have been asking us for more information about where p2p is used today and whether it is efficient in different situations. While we’re happy to answer individual questions, we’ve decided to make a few key pieces of information generally available.

First, p2p use by country:

As you can see, p2p is used at least a little bit in almost every country around the world. North America, South America, Europe and Asia all have at least one country among the top 5 users of p2p delivery. Western Europe and Eastern Asia in particular, have high concentrations of p2p use.

The 10 countries that use the most p2p (in alphabetical order) are:

Brazil

France

Germany

Great Britain

South Korea

Spain

Taiwan

Turkey

Ukraine

USA

Next, p2p efficiency by country:

Peer efficiency illustrates the percentage of content offloaded to our p2p network. The darker the blue, the higher the peer efficiency within the country.

Peer efficiency tops out at just over 90% in the darkest blue areas. As you can see, Eastern Europe and Central Asia consistently have among the highest efficiency rates, however, peer efficiency is generally pretty high around the world. To give another reference point, North America has overall peer efficiency ratios of about 50%. Even in North America, half of your traffic can be delivered through p2p networks, saving you money and scaling your delivery.

The 10 countries with peer efficiency at or above 75% in our data set (in alphabetical order) are:

Andorra

Belarus

Cook Islands

Kazakhstan

Kyrgyzstan

Russia

Spain

Tajikistan

Turkmenistan

Ukraine

So there’s some quick, but interesting insight into p2p usage. Basically, p2p technology is used everywhere, even behind the Great Firewall of China, and peer efficiency is quite high. P2P is geographically agnostic, no matter where viewers are, p2p can help deliver better streams. This illustrates what we’ve been telling people all along: p2p is no longer relegated to niche use cases, instead it’s become a mainstream technology.

Want to see how Peer5’s P2P CDN can optimize your video streams? Check out our website here or register for your own Peer5 account here.

Peer5 offers a serverless, peer-to-peer content delivery network (CDN) for massively-scaled video streaming, in order to provide TV-grade broadcasting experiences to the Internet. With Peer5, instead of viewers fetching all of your streams from servers, they’ll work together to deliver the highest quality stream possible. This means that Peer5 effectively turns the peak demand issue into an advantage – the more users that watch, the more effective the streaming becomes. By increasing our customers’ streaming capacity by a factor of up to 100x, Peer5 ensures perfect video playback with no buffering for millions of viewers every day.