Hi folks
Here is an excellent article regarding the control of P2P traffic. It has been a discussion point for some time now, and this article highlights most of the important points and gives possible solutions… It is quite long, but definitely worth a read!
http://www.lightreading.com/document.asp?doc_id=44435
Here is a taste
“Peer-to-peer (P2P) IP networking goes to the very heart of the original Internet concept: distributed autonomous processes (peers) intercommunicating over a dumb packet network without any central control. But add the rapid and accelerating uptake of mass-market broadband IP access, and the result is rampaging bandwidth consumption that is threatening to choke the Internet on an uncontrolled diet of file-sharing traffic, much of it of dubious legality.
Welcome to the world of mass-market P2P media file sharing – the first killer application of the broadband age. It's both popular and bandwidth intensive. What more could an ISP want? Yet how much are they making out of it? Zilch, pretty much, because it is all part of an undifferentiated traffic stream (and mostly offnet, to boot). And what is it costing them? An arm and a leg as new capacity fills up, congestion grows, and P2P non-enthusiasts (they exist) complain more loudly about falling service quality as their traffic gets squeezed out.
On some networks, sophisticated measurements show that over 90 percent of traffic is P2P at times. Worse, ISPs may not even realize how much P2P traffic they have, as standard methods of analyzing traffic by looking at TCP ports are frequently fooled by P2P applications using random ports or those usually assigned to other applications.
But P2P doesn’t have to be the first ISP-killer application (the hyphen is important). P2P is actually a highly efficient and resilient method of distributing content over IP. So it makes a lot of sense from both an engineering and business viewpoint to think of ways of exploiting these virtues.
And it can be done, but only by making the network more intelligent and application-aware. Current network architectures just aren’t designed to cope with P2P traffic patterns or even to distinguish them. Yet, with the right tools and application management platforms, P2P traffic can be identified, classified, controlled – and eventually built into revenue generating services."
Here is an excellent article regarding the control of P2P traffic. It has been a discussion point for some time now, and this article highlights most of the important points and gives possible solutions… It is quite long, but definitely worth a read!
http://www.lightreading.com/document.asp?doc_id=44435
Here is a taste
“Peer-to-peer (P2P) IP networking goes to the very heart of the original Internet concept: distributed autonomous processes (peers) intercommunicating over a dumb packet network without any central control. But add the rapid and accelerating uptake of mass-market broadband IP access, and the result is rampaging bandwidth consumption that is threatening to choke the Internet on an uncontrolled diet of file-sharing traffic, much of it of dubious legality.
Welcome to the world of mass-market P2P media file sharing – the first killer application of the broadband age. It's both popular and bandwidth intensive. What more could an ISP want? Yet how much are they making out of it? Zilch, pretty much, because it is all part of an undifferentiated traffic stream (and mostly offnet, to boot). And what is it costing them? An arm and a leg as new capacity fills up, congestion grows, and P2P non-enthusiasts (they exist) complain more loudly about falling service quality as their traffic gets squeezed out.
On some networks, sophisticated measurements show that over 90 percent of traffic is P2P at times. Worse, ISPs may not even realize how much P2P traffic they have, as standard methods of analyzing traffic by looking at TCP ports are frequently fooled by P2P applications using random ports or those usually assigned to other applications.
But P2P doesn’t have to be the first ISP-killer application (the hyphen is important). P2P is actually a highly efficient and resilient method of distributing content over IP. So it makes a lot of sense from both an engineering and business viewpoint to think of ways of exploiting these virtues.
And it can be done, but only by making the network more intelligent and application-aware. Current network architectures just aren’t designed to cope with P2P traffic patterns or even to distinguish them. Yet, with the right tools and application management platforms, P2P traffic can be identified, classified, controlled – and eventually built into revenue generating services."
