Metered billing and broadband caps be damned—consumer hunger for on-demand applications and video has put Netflix way out in front when it comes to data use. According to the Sandvine company's latest Global Internet Phenomena report, the online video company now accounts for 29.7 percent of all peak time wired network download traffic in North America.

That represents a 44 percent increase over Netflix's share of data deployment in 2010.

"Netflix is now the unquestioned king of North America’s fixed access networks," the study concludes. And Sandvine's measurements of total traffic averaged over the full day indicate that the online video provider has even outpaced BitTorrent as the top data dog on North American wired systems. Netflix has a 22.2 percent share, as opposed to BitTorrent's 21.6.

Divided opinions

But despite P2P filesharing's "marginal drop" in peak traffic data share from fall 2010 to spring 2011 (.4 percent), Sandvine doesn't think that BitTorrent will disappear from the online landscape anytime soon.

"Despite the emergence of an 'on-demand' mentality, P2P networks have maintained a relatively consistent share of Internet traffic, and absolute volumes continue to increase," the report notes. "Opinions no doubt remain divided as to whether P2P's staying power is evidence of widespread piracy or mainstream acceptance of the ease of distribution that P2P networks like BitTorrent provide for content creators."

Readers might want to take these findings with a grain of digital salt. Sandvine provided the deep packet inspection technology that Comcast used back in 2007 and 2008 to slow down BitTorrent (the ISP then switched to a "protocol agnostic" network management system). Not surprisingly, the document comes with oblique advertisements for the company's network management services.

"With the rapid success of Netflix in Canada," the Sandvine report notes, "Internet providers worldwide, regardless of access technology and degree of mobility, must plan for a future in which on-demand video (whether provided by Netflix or another service) is a large proportion, if not the majority of, last-mile traffic."

Still, this study reflects the newly won dominance of what it calls Real-Time Entertainment—basically downloaded and live video. Such fare represented 29.5 percent of North American peak time data share in 2009. In 2011 it gobbled up almost half: 49.2 percent.

Europe

In Europe, the trends are more pronounced, because Europeans consume much more data than North Americans. Countries like Lithuania have strong high-speed fiber networks. Median monthly usage across Europe is 14.7GB. That's over twice the North American usage rate.

And BitTorrent is far more competitive with Real-Time Entertainment on that side of the Atlantic. File sharing represented 30.1 percent of peak period aggregate traffic in March, 2011. RTE came to just slightly more: 33.2 percent.

Sandvine finds year-by-year trends in Europe difficult to pin down, "because it seems like the continent's networks reflect rapidly shifting user preferences." But:

An important exception in this dynamic market is the Real-Time Entertainment category, which continues to grow steadily. In 2009, this category accounted for 30.4% of aggregate bytes during peak period, but steady growth has led to the category generating 33.2% of all bytes in the window covered by this study. Consequently, regardless of the continuing changes taking place on Europe's fixed access networks, subscribers are embracing on-demand entertainment applications and the continent’s service providers should expect to see this trend continue at the expense of Web Browsing and P2P Filesharing.

That's an interesting prediction, given that Sandvine's own data indicating that file sharing jumped from 11 percent in 2010 to 30.1 percent in 2011.

Latin America

Sandvine classifies Latin America as a "fixed-replacement market," which means that most Latin American consumers get their Internet via mobile phones. Thus, the Real-Time Entertainment data use share is less pronounced: 27.5 percent in March, 2011. Meanwhile P2P file sharing use has varied: it represented 26.8 percent of peak period traffic in January of 2010, went down to 15.4 percent in September, 2010, and rose back up to 18 percent in March of 2011.

Nonetheless, Sandvine calls this a "preponderance of P2P Filesharing traffic," and attributes it to laptop use. "While P2P Filesharing applications do exist for handsets and tablets, laptops generally exhibit higher levels of P2P Filesharing traffic," the report explains. "It is possible that the growth in P2P Filesharing simply reflects a changing device landscape from handsets (with limited P2P support and smaller storage) to laptops, with massive hard drives and larger appetites."

Is P2P sharing in Latin America actually growing? Yes, if you measure the difference between September 2010 and 2011. If you measure the difference between January 2010 and 2011, it has dramatically declined. Perhaps the modest levels of broadband penetration in some of these countries make a categorical conclusion difficult.

"Many mobile networks in Latin America are still at the early stages of growth, and feature phones are the most common devices," the report observes. "Consequently, data usage is relatively low, with median monthly usage of 58.1 MB and mean monthly usage of 893.7 MB."