File-swappers and Internet service providers may soon be able to bury the hatchet says a few day old but still interesting article on how ISPs can better manage P2P activity to everyone’s benefit. It’s nice to see people working on solving bandwidth congestion, since this is one of the strong arguments being used by those wanting ISPs to limit P2P activity on the false premise of bandwidth concerns.
You can read the whole article at Globe Technology
Animosity between the two camps has been simmering over the past few years with the increasing popularity of peer-to-peer file-sharing networks, such as Napster, Kazaa and Bearshare. Service providers have noted that Internet traffic has increased dramatically since the arrival of the file-swapping phenomenon, and as a result they have blamed users, sometimes calling them “bandwidth hogs” — or worse.
But if everyone agreed that P2P networks require a lot of bandwidth to run, Internet providers had little idea exactly how bad the problem is. All they knew was that their business model relied on estimates of how much bandwidth they needed to buy to supply their subscribers; that estimation proved wholly inadequate after the arrival of P2P, and as a result profits dropped.
Things began to change in September, when Sandvine Inc., a network-equipment maker based in Waterloo, Ont., published a paper that said peer-to-peer networks accounted for as much as 60 per cent of Internet traffic.
Most of it, Sandvine said, was caused by “chatter” — background communication among the millions of computers on peer-to-peer networks, including constant messages announcing the presence of individual computers (called “keep-alives”) as well as the constant passing of search information.
“Popular file sharing programs like Kazaa and Morpheus ignore the logical topology of service provider networks,” Sandvine said in a statement. “The result is ad-hoc connectivity with P2P clients on other networks. This propensity to push data traffic ‘off Net’ drives up Internet transit costs and erodes profitability.”
Now, the company that defined the problem has announced the arrival of a product that promises to calm these troubled waters.
Sandvine’s Peer-To-Peer Policy Management, a hardware and software bundle, allows service providers to create policies that direct file-sharing traffic down cheaper network paths.
It lowers network costs by rearranging P2P network structure, analyzing P2P searches and ensuring that each is search is redirected to hosts on a lower-cost path before attempting to reach hosts on a higher-cost path.
