Managing Open P2P Traffic

Transit Link Growth

 Peer-to-Peer (P2P) applications represent a major challenge for ISPs today. P2P traffic, which accounts for upwards of 60% of all Internet traffic today – and grows at high rates – consumes the majority of ISP network capacity and drives up transit bandwidth costs.

Adding more transit bandwidth will almost instantly lead to more consumption. Without managing the P2P traffic, buying additional bandwidth will have little long term effect other than increasing bandwidth costs for the ISP.

Deep Packet Inspection (DPI) devices use protocol-level shaping and provide a very effective tool for ISPs to reduce bandwidth consumed by P2P traffic and to give other traffic a higher priority on their network. However, since P2P adoption has significantly increased among broadband users, limiting or blocking P2P traffic ultimately leads to customer dissatisfaction, increased churn and more importantly negatively affects the ISP’s brand name.

P2P applications and their ability to access all forms of digital media is the leading reason why Internet users are flocking towards high speed broadband networks. P2P users have grown into one of the largest communities in the online world with more than 10,000,000 P2P users online at any given time. In fact, the majority of P2P users actually subscribe to the highest bandwidth packages offered by the ISPs. With intense competition between ISPs to acquire subscribers any solution that degrades the subscriber quality of experience negatively impacts ISP competitiveness.

By caching content accessed via P2P networks, UltraBand reduces the amount of overall Internet transit bandwidth an ISP needs to support subscriber demand. This is a significant amount when considering that upwards of 60% of all network traffic is now P2P.

UltraBand Smart Bandwidth™ solution provide several advantages and is a crucial element to the ISP infrastructure as broadband content continues to grow rapidly.

• Generate bandwidth instantly – It is the only solution that can manage the peaks and valleys associated with P2P usage. Caching in effect generates bandwidth on an as needed basis to support peak usage without having to oversubscribe network bandwidth.
• Improve network response times – Actually improves network response times for both P2P and non-P2P applications and improves the customer experience.
• Integration into ISP QoS framework - Allows L7-based visibility of cache-generated and peer-generated P2P bandwidth across ISP network, allowing prioritization and management of this traffic across the board.
• Reduced network redundancy requirements – as bandwidth generated from cache is easily regulated, ISPs may invest less into access-side redundancy infrastructure and manage higher priority traffic classes in fault situation.
• Manage P2P experience – Only a caching platform can provide complete management of the P2P user experience constraining bandwidth costs and ensuring high customer satisfaction. It also enables ISPs to offer P2P file sharing as a premium value-added service.