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Making broadband cheaper through P2P caching
| Rudolph Muller | July 19, 2010 | No comments |
Rudolph Muller
Rudolph Muller is the editor at MyBroadband and covers telecoms and broadband news. Rudolph comes from an academic background, but left the University of...
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Peer-to-Peer (P2P) caching can save ISPs a great deal on international and local bandwidth fees
South African broadband prices are closely linked with national and international bandwidth prices. The cost of both national and international capacity has come down over the last twelve months which resulted in significantly lower ADSL bandwidth prices.
Despite the lower backhaul bandwidth prices ADSL service providers can benefit further from either having on-net content or free and open peering where no national transit costs are charged for getting content from another network.
Web caching – where web documents like HTML pages and images are stored on an on-net server to reduce bandwidth usage and improve performance – is implemented by most large Internet Service Providers (ISPs).
A significant percentage of Internet traffic, especially international traffic, is however generated by Peer-to-Peer (P2P) file sharing services where content is typically not cached. P2P users share movies, TV series, music and software with each other which consume large amounts of bandwidth.
Local ISP Web Africa has now limited the impact of P2P traffic on its international network by implementing a P2P caching system where the most popular peer-to-peer files are stored on-net. This has the dual benefit of saving international bandwidth and creating a far better P2P experience for Web Africa subscribers.
It is estimated that 75% of P2P content is requested multiple times which makes it very suitable for caching, and Web Africa CEO Matthew Tagg said that they are saving around 20% on international bandwidth since installing their P2P caching solution.
Questions have been raised about the legality of ‘storing’ copyrighted material on a P2P caching server, but Tagg said that the P2P caching system vendors have done due diligence and that it is compliant with most international legal systems.
“We are not storing any copyrighted material. We are merely creating a more efficient transit system for the propagation of traffic,” said Tagg. “You cannot sue an ISP because people can download movies using the Internet.”
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