Managing Open P2P Traffic

Download Byte Caps

Although the growth of broadband data services has been impressive, the competitive environment amongst ISPs has led to a commoditization of these services. Most of the ISP products today offer “Unlimited Data” and “Always On” services. The primary differentiation among services today is based on price and download/upload speeds.

The move towards offering an “Unlimited Data” plan was a calculated risk. Service Provider management never anticipated that the subscribers would overwhelm the network resources. Today, P2P applications pose a significant threat to that assumption. P2P applications typically consume substantial network resources – bandwidth - because they take advantage of the always-on characteristic of the subscribers’ broadband connection; this allows subscribers using P2P applications to continuously share a virtually unlimited number of files. Irrespective of a Service Providers bandwidth tier plans and because of the batch nature of most P2P applications, very high volumes of traffic can be generated over a very long periods of time, thereby increasing network load. Even subscribers paying for a lower tier service could actually introduce more network load and thus burden the system with greater cost. ISPs are facing rapidly increasing infrastructure costs without the means to extract more revenue. To date, most operators have simply increased data capacity - a costly and inherently short term and ineffective approach. The growing number of P2P users and applications will rapidly consume additional capacity.

Some ISPs have modified their acceptable usage policies and have adopted bandwidth caps to limit those subscribers who have exceeded certain download limits (such 5GB of data downloads per month). While the approach likely limits heavy P2P usage, it seems doubtful that subscribers accustomed to unlimited plans will tolerate these new policies and will seek more competitive service offerings.

Going forward, with the growing adoption of Broadband video delivery, where numerous content owners are embracing and adopting P2P based content delivery services, the problem is only going to be exacerbated and users will be looking for “real” unlimited bandwidth packages and in many cases will be willing to pay premium pricing. Without the right solution, ISPs will not be able to offer “real” unlimited packages without suffering the consequences of network congestion, displeased customers and subscriber churn.

By deploying PeerApp’s UltraBand P2P caching solution ISPs can offer unlimited usage and to heavy P2P users for a premium price tag, without impacting the network resources. With UltraBand’s patented technology - producing high hit ratios as much as 70-80% - most of the downloads will be served from UltraBand.