Greek IX traffic slashed down to 30% – torrents closed

Thanx saperdurper for this note.

This is actually the GRIX/AIX, not the GRNET (i.e. academic network). GRIX/AIX is the internet traffic exchanger for all Greek telecom operators and these data depict the total traffic of the GRIX/AIX, so practically it is the traffic exchanged between Greek internet users (which seems to be primarily p2p).

U can also check the yearly stats in http://www.gr-ix.gr/services/statistics/grix-ai… and see for yourself that this gap is out of scale and clearly not within any normal holiday user behaviour (for instance check the statistics during summertime).

For the record, I was also very skeptical about it, yet after a bit of research I conculded to that.

Students' DSL lines exchange traffic with ISPs so they also “pass through” GRIX/AIX.

Some facts:
a) The fall is very significant during the previous weekend which is the one that many many students return to their base (subscriber count for students' dsl is already down by 20%).
b) There has been some kind of “raid” to greek torrent site(s).
c) Students are always the major downloaders.

Some related graphs:
i) Students DSL traffic: http://graph.noc.ntua.gr/a/graph_2963.html
ii) Students DSL subscriber count: http://graph.noc.ntua.gr/a/graph_2241.html

So it's a mix of things going on. Regarding the tracker(s) that closed, I can't believe that it was _them_ creating so much traffic, but greek users got scared in general, mainly due to the way the issue was brought in public by the media, and users stopped leaching/seeding to any trackers.

cheers