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Sep 13, 2002

P2P traffic swamps broadband networks

The Register reports:
P2P activity accounts for up to 60 per cent of the total traffic on any service provider network, Sandvine found during its study. Users downloading and uploading files accounts for only a portion of this data traffic. It's the overhead generated by these applications - advertising, searching functions, and other transactions largely transparent to most users - that are the real bandwidth hogs.

and

"Generally speaking if you boot up KaZaA this evening on your home PC, you're more likely to connect with users in another country or another continent, than you are to connect with a KaZaA user on your own service provider's network."
Now, that is interesting. Let's think about one potential path to solve that problem:
  • Step 1: The broadband providers will limit the outside-the-own-network traffic volume that users can consume (even if they have flat rate tarriffs).
  • Step 2: Users that use "unregulated" p2p applications will be punished with extra fees due to these apps searching across the whole Internet for data.
  • Step 3: These users will then be incentiviced to search for "regulated" p2p apps. Regulated would mean that inside-the-own-network traffic would be preferred.
  • Step 4: Then, either (a) p2p apps will start cooperating with the telcos on channeling traffic, or (b) p2p apps will invent more clever ways of preferring inside-the-own-network traffic (Kontiki says they have such a solution in their so-called bandwidth harvesting), or (c) some standard will be set up and combine a + b.
  • Step 5: All those unregulated p2p apps will die.

    I hope I'm not too far off the charts with this, but it seems to be one potential free market solution. Probably there's better articles on this topic somewhere, but hey, why should I not chip in my points on my own weblog.
    Posted by Stefan Smalla on Sep 13, 2002 at 16:31 | Permalink