In order to meet the challenges of constantly developing IT infrastructures and ever-increasing bandwidth consumption, it is important to take into consideration today's major vehicles of content distribution. They consume a high volume of bandwidth and subsequently pose a risk to service providers' operations and profitability.


(source: Cisco VNI 2009)

Massive traffic generators include the following:
 

• P2P File Sharing: For the past few years, P2P applications were the most common platform for sharing files. Such services are notorious consumers of bandwidth, and those using P2P applications consume far more bandwidth than others. It is estimated that in 2007, 20% of Europeans used P2P file sharing applications in some form or another, while "in the Middle East the total percentage of Internet usage for file sharing is around 85%, and hitting 95% at night time". However, an "NPD Group survey of teens aged 13 to 17 has found that teens' use of P2P networks to download music dropped by 6 percent in 2008." This is due to the growing popularity of sites like iLike, Playlist and imeem.
   
• Usenet: Usenet is a distributed network of servers that can store and forward messages and files. It was established in 1980 as a discussion group based on a network with servers loosely connected in a partial mesh, and since then it has become a hugely popular and growing medium for anonymously sharing files. Users can post files on one of Usenet's servers, and those files can then be download by others. Usenet is a paid service that allows users to download at full line capacity, which makes downloading 5 to 40 gbytes easy, but which consumes huge amounts of bandwidth. A single enthusiastic Usenet user can actually have a notable impact on the usage of a small service provider's international line. 
   
• File Sharing Websites:  Service providers have been discovering that centralized websites such as 4Shared and RapidShare are quickly taking over where P2P left off. As a platform that provides access to dozens, if not hundreds, of terabytes, RapidShare is ranked as the 16th most visited website globally. And enabling the download of files greater than 35 gigabytes in size, sites like RapidShare are quickly becoming one of the biggest consumers of service providers' bandwidth.

• Community Web Sites: Next generation social networking platforms like Facebook, MySpace and imeem have become content sharing hubs, with embedded video, photos, music and much more. The sheer volume of media shared between users from within their profiles is one of the contributing factors to this generation's increase in bandwidth consumption. 
   
• Video Streaming: Video streaming has significantly grown in popularity over the course of the past couple of years. Sites such as YouTube, DailyMotion and MetaCafe all provide a central location for visitors to find all types of video. In addition, streaming content is standard for any site, including corporate, entertainment and instructional websites. With the growing use of streaming video comes a heavy price - higher bandwidth utilization. 

Some traffic types do not match standard categories, posing a challenge for optimization systems. These include:
 

• Dynamic Content: The migration of websites from static to dynamic raises new issues of optimization. An example of dynamic content might be a news website that is constantly updated and reorganized, with information moving from one location to another, including videos and images. In order to efficiently cache this repetitive information you need to identify the information on a more fundamental level, such as repetitive bit streams, separate from its current location on a particular webpage. 

• Dynamic URLs: Dynamic URLs are basically containers which display the results of a query. While static URLs remain the same unless its source HTML is manually modified, dynamic URLs are automatically populated, and can almost be considered unique each time it is visited. Sites like imeem and others that utilize dynamic URLs pose a particular dilemma to service providers. These sites cannot be cached, making it hard to find solutions capable of optimizing dynamic URL content.
   
• High Definition Media: The proliferation of high definition video is being driven by two factors: 1. the popularity of HD TV and video, and the availability of this technology to the masses at reasonable prices; and 2. the advent of websites like RapidShare and the evolution of Usenet, enabling downloads of multiple-gigabyte files. The results are devastating for ISPs, both in terms of operability due to the congestion of international lines, and the erosion of profitability as the consumption of bandwidth skyrockets.

As can be seen, the bandwidth challenges facing Internet service providers are no small matter. The proliferation of videos, growing consumption, ever changing technology and improving quality all promise to keep pressure on service providers to provide more bandwidth, faster - and all while maintaining an up-to-date network infrastructure. This translates into an urgent need among service providers to scale their operations to meet this burgeoning need for bandwidth.