North American Network Operators Group
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Re: Regional differences in P2P

  • From: Walter De Smedt
  • Date: Sun Jul 18 11:05:08 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