The Issue

By January 30, 2017, “the average volume of encrypted Internet data finally surpassed the average volume of unencrypted traffic, according to Mozilla.”1 Considering that the use of encryption by Internet web sites is trending up, prospective customers ask how PerfTech continues to achieve delivery rates approaching 100%. Understanding that PerfTech’s in-browser messaging technology delivers only upon unencrypted web requests, it would seem that the likelihood of successful message delivery would be proportionally restricted to the lowering volume of unencrypted traffic.

However, an analysis each year for the past 3 years of time-stamped message deliveries by PerfTech’s messaging platform at the same, major customer ISP shows a minimal drop of .6% from 2014 to 2015, and 1.2% from 2015 to 2016, in delivery rates over the first 20 hours from message launch.

Cumulative % of deliveries achieved during first 20 hours per year:

2014: 98.1%

2015: 97.5%

2016: 96.3%

The 2016 statistics in more detail (based on 4,654,363 events, 1 March-31 December):

Time	Deliveries	PerfTech	Cumulative %
1 min	93,263	2.00%	2.00%
5 min	179,666	3.86%	5.86%
10 min	151,858	3.26%	9.13 %
20 min	233,484	5.02%	14.14%
30 min	188,808	4.06%	18.20%
1 hr	440,868	9.47%	27.67%
2 hr	630,735	13.55%	41.22%
4 hr	839,288	18.03%	59.26%
6 hr	590,956	12.70%	71.95%
8 hr	489,033	10.51%	82.46%
10 hr	377,364	8.11%	90.57%
12 hr	171,286	3.68%	94.25%
20 hr	95,053	2.04%	96.29%
24 hr	28,846	0.62%	96.91%
48 hr	47,902	1.03%	97.94%
72 hr	10,993	0.24%	98.17%
1 week	7,535	0.16%	98.34%

Why Growing Encryption Has Had So Little Impact on PerfTech Delivery Rates

The fact that PerfTech’s delivery rates have fallen only about 1% per year while encryption has risen to 50% can most likely be attributed to these general factors:

1. The rising volume of encrypted video traffic has no impact on PerfTech delivery rates

· In March, 2016, Sandvine reported that 71% of primetime traffic over fixed broadband lines is video (Netflix, YouTube, Amazon). Encrypted video thus represents a large portion of encrypted traffic

· In articles relating to encryption percentages, traffic volume and web page transactions are often used interchangeably, when they are two separate facets to be considered

· Overall volume percentages do not affect in-browser delivery rates nearly to the degree that transactions, or page loads, do

· PerfTech never delivered messaging during video; thus the huge growth in the volume of traffic attributed to video has had no effect on PerfTech delivery rates

2. While the encryption percentage goes up, so does the absolute number of unencrypted pages

· There are over 1.1 billion websites on the Internet today2, and millions created daily

· As of March 2016, there were approximately 4.63 billion pages3

· A Nov 2016 report by Google says only 34 of top 100 non-Google sites use HTTPS by default4

· Millions of sites may not lend themselves to encryption anytime soon for various reasons, such as:

o Sites whose owners lack the technical resources to retrofit their pages

o Sites that load content from thousands of ad brokers and other content sources; in March, 2015, among more than 2,000 known ad trackers, a mere 14.3% used encryption5

o Sites that are influenced by political entities who want the Web to remain trackable

3. It Takes Only One Unencrypted Page to Deliver an In-Browser Message

· Bulletin System is persistent, and monitors every upstream HTTP request for an opportunity to deliver

· it takes only one unencrypted page to successfully deliver a message

Notes

1 Jan 30, 2017:

https://www.wired.com/2017/01/half-web-now-encrypted-makes-everyone-safer/

2 Mar 14, 2017

http://www.internetlivestats.com/total-number-of-websites/

3 Mar 2016

https://www.wpmultiverse.com/blog/how-many-websites-are-there/

4 Jan 2017