According to a Macworld UK report…

A new study that looks at the impact of peer-to-peer (P2P) traffic on service provider networks shows file swapping forges on unabated.

CacheLogic of Cambridge, England says the practice shows no sign of slowing down despite court rulings that have shut down some popular sites such as Suprnova, a BitTorrent tracking service that offered links to pilfered television and movie content.

CacheLogic’s global monitoring network shows 60 per cent of all Internet traffic is the result of peer-to-peer file-sharing platforms, with eDonkey taking over the top spot from BitTorrent.

“The Whack-A-Mole game continues,” says Andrew Parker, CacheLogic’s CTO. “The authorities go after one [peer-to-peer] system and another one pops up.”

At the end of 2004, BitTorrent accounted for 30 per cent of all Internet traffic. But after the Motion Picture Association of America’s moves to shut down BitTorrent tracking sites, centralized servers for locating distributed content, swappers began moving to other less-publicized services. Today, eDonkey, a system that uses no centralized servers or tracking sites, consumes the most bandwidth of any application on the Internet, particularly overseas, according to Parker. In the US, Gnutella has seen resurgence in popularity among swappers.

Of the files being swapped on the four major file-sharing systems (eDonkey, BitTorrent, FastTrack and Gnutella) 62 per cent is video and 11 per cent is audio, with the rest being miscellaneous file types, according to the study.