Most everyone is aware of the havoc peer-to-peer traffic can cause on a service provider’s network.  But many may not be aware that some solutions now exist to control this traffic. 

The first question that needs to be reviewed is, do you want to control this traffic?  There are two divergent schools of thought on this. Many service providers see P2P traffic as a way to charge for additional value-added services. Others still believe they want to block P2P traffic from their network and turn off these accounts.  The latter group might find some new opportunities for service offers embedded in this article.

The problem

Let’s start with a little bit of background to make sure everyone is on the same page.  As P2P traffic continues to grow, service provider’s network usage patterns are changing and the current school of thought related to provisioning is no longer sufficient.  This growth in traffic causes network congestion, performance deterioration and ultimately customer dissatisfaction.  These items combined may also cause customer churn. 

Traditionally, information is exchanged via the Internet through a client/server model.  With P2P exchange of data, the creation of decentralized groups allows for information to flow over the public Internet in an anonymous logical fashion. The individual users of these applications are shielded via this anonymity.  In addition to the issues created due to copyright infringement via this form of information exchange, the service providers no longer have the ability to forecast network capacity based on historical subscriber usage patterns. There are four key areas where service providers are feeling the pinch:

1) Upstream/downstream traffic is flipped where the upstream traffic is much larger then the downstream traffic.  This results in network congestion on the upstream link that was never planned for with initial broadband deployments.

2) Time of day usage statistics no longer apply.  Previously, service providers could assume peak usage at certain times of the day and lower usage at other times.  With P2P applications, the computers are often left to transfer data throughout the day in an unattended fashion.

3) Previously, peering traffic always traversed the Internet to another location.  In today’s world, two home users can form a direction connection.