Ares Galaxy is a truly amazing piece of technology. With just a few clicks of the mouse, you can search an entire network of individual file sharers for the exact data you need and download it from them, entirely free of charge.
It is so easy that many people take the existence of these file sharing networks entirely for granted. However, it may be instructive to contemplate the massive scale of this online experiment, as well as look to what the future may bring.
How Much Internet Traffic Is Used Up By File Sharing?
In this age of affordable broadband connections, we often don’t even think twice about the enormous Internet traffic that fuels our daily Internet use, along with our file sharing habits. But the amount of traffic that is generated by file sharing is staggering. According to a recent study by the ISP Traffic Management firm Sandvine, the average Internet user downloads no less than 7 GigaBytes per month if they are located in the US, and 14.7 GigaBytes per month if they are European.
Now, of course, not all of this traffic is used for just file sharing. In fact, the biggest traffic hog on the Internet is not file sharing but what is called “Real-Time Entertainment”, meaning streaming audio and (mostly) video services such as BBC’s iPlayer and YouTube. RTE took up 33.2% of the total traffic in the EU in 2011.
Still, file sharing is not that far off, with a traffic share of about 30% of the total aggregate traffic (but more than half of the upstream activity). The most active network is by far BitTorrent, with eDonkey and Ares Galaxy quite far behind in terms of absolute traffic.
Will There Be More Or Less File Sharing In The Future?
Last year’s Cisco Visual Networking Index includes the prediction that global file-sharing traffic will increase to almost 14 exabytes per month by 2015. However, this absolute increase of file sharing traffic will be combined with a relative decrease of the percentage of total traffic it accounts for: in three years, less than 24% of total Internet traffic is predicted to arise from file sharing activities.
How is this possible? First of all, the use of file sharing programs such as BitTorrent clients and Ares Galaxy has already reached a peak in Europe and rapidly approaching one in the United States. Although there is significant growth to be expected in Latin America and in Central and Eastern Europe, it seems that there are limits to its growth in the more “mature” markets.
Secondly, the rate of growth of video streaming services such as the RTE giants Netflix and YouTube is significantly greater than that of file sharing programs such as Ares Galaxy and BitTorrent. Of the additional people who are entering the system, more seem to prefer using streaming services rather than sharing the content on file sharing networks, which explains the decreasing importance of it in the total traffic amount.
Lastly, and rather surprisingly, non-P2P file-sharing traffic seems to be growing once again, which also decreases the need for file sharing alternatives. However, this trend is very difficult to predict, considering the recent developments on the market (such as the closing of MegaUpload).
In any case, Ares Galaxy is here to stay. Ares has proven to be versatile and innovative enough to adapt to the changing circumstances of the past 10 years, and will continue to do so in the time to come. So download the free Ares download and start sharing!