Apple's iTunes, FaceTime among most heavily trafficked Web services in North America

Apple's iTunes has grown from 1.9 percent of downstream traffic in May to now holding 3.27 percent, the latest figures from Sandvine show, as reported on Monday by AllThingsD. The share of downstream traffic taken by iTunes grew as file sharing service BitTorrent shrank over the same timespan, from 5.57 percent in May to 4.05 percent.

The amount of traffic used by iTunes ranked it fifth in terms of North American downstream traffic, narrowing the gap with fourth-place BitTorrent.

Remaining the market leader for downstream usage was Netflix, accounting for a massive 31.62 percent of all usage. Taking second place was YouTube with 18.69 percent, followed by general HTTP traffic.

Other noteworthy services rounding out the top 10 were Amazon Video (8th place, 1.61 percent), Facebook (9th place, 1.31 percent), and Hulu (10th place, 1.29 percent).

Another Apple service also appeared among the separate list of most popular upstream applications is Apple's FaceTime, which came in 9th place with 1.44 percent of all upstream traffic. That placed Apple ahead of 10th-place finisher Dropbox, which took 1.39 percent of upstream traffic.

In terms of upstream data, BitTorrent consumes by far the greatest share, with a 36.35 percent share. HTTP traffic is in second with 6.03 percent, followed by SSL (5.87 percent), Netflix (4.44 percent), YouTube (3.63 percent) and Skype (2.76 percent).