Regional differences in P2P

Sun Jul 18 14:59:57 UTC 2004

Mikael Abrahamsson wrote:

>On Sun, 18 Jul 2004, Stephen J. Wilcox wrote:
>
>  
>
>>you can also be fairly accurate from the flow data.. eg genuine web traffic is 
>>short small transfers, P2P is long-lived flows of continous high usage
>>    
>>
>
>In the long run, there is no way to accurately determine what kind of
>traffic everything is, and short of making encryption illegal and doing
>deep packet inspection, there is no future for those kinds of measures
>anyway.
>
>Only way I see is to use L3 information as that's basically the only thing 
>we're asked from our customers to handle (in most cases anyway), we move 
>packets from one IP address to another IP address. 
>
>  
>
This might be true from a transit provider standpoint or 'packet mover', 
but not for DSL/Cable operators which are also ISP. They see big traffic 
increases over the last 2 years mostly due to P2P that trigger expensive 
network upgrades in the access - network load (and the investments 
related to it) and the revenues from subscribers are diverging. Such 
operators typically have flat rates and have a limited nr of profiles in 
terms of up-/downstream BW and Cap/month.  A small percentage of the 
subs (20-30%) is responsable for a large percentage of the aggregated 
load on the network (60-80%). 

It makes more sense to introduce more differentiation in product 
offerings (pricing) where BW 'hoggers' pay more than the 'moderate' 
users instead of a general price increase. The net effect should be that 
profits increase, either by reduced network load or by higher revenues 
from product differentiation.

This differentiation is less effective when it is based purely on US/DS 
BW and CAP alone. The main issue from a access network standpoint lies 
in the concurrent usage during peak hours where BW hoggers could affect 
the casual surfer. Surely, the monthly cap and rate-limitations 
mitigates this somewhat but only to a certain degree. A more efficient 
way would be to offer differentiated application-based services (e.g. 
gaming, P2P, VoIP, ...) Some of the applications could be accounted for 
at the service endpoint (e.g. gaming portal,voip services provided by 
the ISP), others need network-based metering/control.

accounting/monitoring applications => know your users => define products 
=>  network-based enforcement

Caveat: this might be an utopian vision ;-)

-walter