[LINK] Relieving Peer-to-peer Pressure

[jeff.evans at iird.vic.gov.au]

Interesting business model evolving? Article seems to imply the model is
"Create a problem the profit from solving it?"

   Relieving Peer-to-peer Pressure
   http://www.technologyreview.com/articles/wo_hadenius022504.asp?trk=nl
   Traffic from peer-to-peer programs like Kazaa and Skype floods the Net.
   Now we see products that are aimed at channeling the traffic better.
   Guess who's behind them.

   As the music downloading frenzy continues unabated, Internet service
   providers (ISPs) are finding their infrastructure and business models
   imperiled.  The main threat comes from the popularity of peer-to-peer
   programs such as Kazaa, which connect users without using a server.
   "Peer-to-peer activity corresponds to at least one fifth of Internet
   traffic and is likely to continue to grow relentlessly in the future"
   says University of California, Riverside researcher Thomas Karagiannis,
   who works with the Cooperative Association for Internet Data Analysis on
   measuring peer-to-peer traffic.

   More traffic means a higher cost for the ISPs. Either they get the lines
   clogged lowering customer satisfaction, or they upgrade their networks
   with more bandwidth. This opens a golden business opportunity for
   companies that say they will ease traffic in a way that is cheaper than
   adding more bandwidth.

   One such company appears to have the inside track because?well, because
   it is responsible for much of the peer-to-peer mess to begin with. The
   company is the Swedish startup Joltid. It was launched by Niklas
   Zennström?one of the two co-founders of the file-sharing service Kazaa,
   which is the worst of the peer-to-peer Net-clogging culprits. With
   Joltid, Zennström hope he has come up with a smart way to profit from
   the very problem that Kazaa has done so much to exacerbate.

   ... Per Brand, leader at the Distributed Systems Laboratory at the
   Swedish Institute of Computer Science in Stockholm, says peer-to-peer
   file sharing traffic in Sweden can consume as much as 85 percent of a
   typical ISP's capacity...

   Peer-to-peer congestion is most troublesome in the so-called access
   links?the cables connecting individual users and ISPs to the big
   backbones of the Net. Here is where the growth in traffic, and also
   different traffic patterns, matters the most. Many access links, in
   particular for digital subscriber lines (DSL) and cable modems, provide
   significantly less bandwidth for uploading than for downloading. That
   wasn't an issue when users downloaded much more data than they send back
   to the Internet. But with peer-to-peer, the traffic is more symmetrical
   and therefore requires equal bandwidth in both directions.

Telstra's consumer broadband offerings (and others?) are asymmetrical in
this sense aren't they?

Regards

Jeff Evans
Manager, Business Channel
Department of Innovation, Industry and Regional Development
Victoria, Australia
Ph 03 9651 9590 Fax 03 9651 9725
Email jeff.evans at iird.vic.gov.au
http://www.business.channel.vic.gov.au
http://www.businessaccess.vic.gov.au
http://www.export.vic.gov.au
http://www.ecommerce.vic.gov.au



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