A handful of internet, content and data center players have displaced large telcos as the dominant carriers of IP traffic, according to a study by Arbor Networks.
In what it says is the largest study ever of global commercial internet traffic, Arbor says traffic patterns have changed radically over the five-year period the report covers.
Five years ago, IP traffic was proportionally distributed across tens of thousands of enterprise-managed websites and servers worldwide. Since then it has migrated to a "small number of very large hosting, cloud and content providers," Arbor says.
Out of the 40,000 routed end sites in the internet, 30 large companies like Limelight, Facebook, Google, Microsoft and YouTube "now generate and consume a disproportionate 30% of all internet traffic."
The collapse of wholesale IP transit and the growth in advertisement-supported service have reversed the business dynamics between transit providers, consumer networks and content providers.
"Over the last five years, internet traffic has migrated away from the traditional internet core of 10 to 12 tier-1 international transit providers. Today, the majority of internet traffic by volume flows directly between large content providers, datacenter/CDNs and consumer networks," Arbor said.