File-sharing traffic
today continues to dominate service provider networks
despite earlier suggestions that Peer-to-Peer (P2P)
traffic would diminish with emerging online services and
ongoing industry pressure. This popular technology has
now become a mass-market application and remains a key
driver for broadband adoption in today’s competitive
market. In fact, recent Sandvine studies have confirmed
that it now takes almost 20% of top users to account for
less than 80% of this Internet traffic – this is a
significant shift from previous studies, reinforcing
that file-sharing usage has become much more evenly
balanced among the subscriber base.
The implication for
service providers is clear: File-sharing will continue
to consume bandwidth and stress both the access network
and Internet transit links – proactive steps are needed
to control these immense cost pressures that remain
significant despite the slow downward trend of wholesale
bandwidth prices. With much broader subscriber usage,
however, service providers must consider intelligent
approaches for P2P traffic management that preserve
their subscribers’ online experience while delivering
the necessary bandwidth savings.
Sandvine’s Intelligent
Traffic Management solution offers the widest range of
policy management options available to help service
providers significantly reduce transit bandwidth costs
and to avoid unnecessary capex spending for their access
networks. As a result, service providers can now adopt
new intelligent techniques or more traditional
approaches depending on their particular business
environment. For most service providers, operating in a
competitive market, the most viable strategy is to
leverage Sandvine’s subscriber-friendly approach:
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P2P
session management manages upstream traffic
consumed by external Internet users while
maintaining application performance for
internal subscribers. |
 |
P2P
routing ensures that P2P downloads are
directed down the least-cost network path
rather than simply consuming transit
bandwidth based on the random formation of
P2P relationships. |
 |
Adaptive
shaping that triggers shaping based on
environmental conditions such as time-of-day
to ensure that network resources are fairly
shared among all subscribers.
|
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Captive
portal support to effectively promote
service-menu upgrades and other subscriber
communications. |
Service providers can
achieve necessary cost savings while encouraging
subscriber loyalty rather than alienating their broad
subscriber base with traditional traffic shaping
approaches only.
The effects of
Sandvine P2P Policy Management on the P2P traffic of
a typical service provider network