The adoption of the Internet as the preferred medium for multimedia content distribution has led to ever-increasing growth in the consumption of bandwidth. The source of this growth is the purchase of music and video from on-line stores such as iTunes, file sharing traffic, and other related activities. Additionally, the number of users, files, and file sizes themselves are skyrocketing, with no end in sight. iTune downloads have already exceeded half a billion songs, and peer-to-peer traffic represents 60-80% of all Internet traffic with more than 10 million concurrent users.
To support this huge bandwidth demand, ISPs are forced to buy or lease expensive high-speed international and inter-city links. However, in order to remain profitable and competitive ISPs are vigorously looking for bandwidth optimization solutions enabling them to lower operational expenses.
 

“Entertainment programming dominates broadband use.”
                                                           (Jupiter Research, August 2005) 

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