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For more than four years, peer-to-peer (p2p) applications swapping music and latterly movie files have overwhelmingly consumed the largest percentage of bandwidth, according to broadband technology firm Ellacoya Networks.

As a result of streaming audio and video, however, HTTP accounts for approximately 46% of all traffic on the network while just 37% is p2p. Newsgroups (9%), non-HTTP video streaming (3%), gaming (2%) and VoIP (1%) are the next most widely used applications.

Just one website - YouTube - generates a fifth of all HTTP traffic, nearly 10% of all traffic on the Internet.

"The popularity of browser-based video such as YouTube is having a significant impact not only on overall bandwidth consumption but also on the distribution of application traffic on the network," says Fred Sammartino, vice president of marketing and product management at Ellacoya. "The way people use the Internet is changing rapidly - from browsing to real-time streaming. We expect to see new applications over the next year that will accelerate this trend."