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:

 

	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.
	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.