Carriers take steps to solve bandwidth crunch

Internet providers have turned to traffic shaping and bandwidth prioritization applications to ease the network bottlenecks resulting from the growing use of peer-to-peer (P2P) file sharing. It's a trend industry observers expect to continue. Rogers Communications was recently criticized when the blogosphere revealed that the ISP - in an attempt to better manage finite bandwidth - used its Internet subscriber notification service to highjack and alter websites to send messages to subscribers regarding their monthly network usage caps. Mark Tauschek, senior research analyst with Info-Tech Research Group, isn't surprised by Rogers' behaviour."Carriers will continue to shape and prioritize traffic," says Tauschek. "It is widely known that they are doing this to minimize peer-to-peer traffic, especially on leased backbones."This makes sense. Heavy traffic on leased backbones is an expensive proposition for carriers. Potential savings are so great for bandwidth management, or "traffic shaping", that Tauschek sees it as a growth area."One example is Sandvine Incorporated," he says, referring to the Waterloo-based software company. "They sell traffic shaping applications to carriers, and will take P2P traffic and keep it on your network, so you don't have to pay for backhaul over leased facilities. If you allow that to get out of hand then you have to add bandwidth from upstream providers."Olaf Krahmer, vice-president of service provider operations for Cisco Canada, speaking from the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas, says it is amazing how the individual consumer's appetite for P2P and media has become a driver for bandwidth demand."The type of traffic we are now seeing, and strategies for managing it, have changed quite a bit," he says. "Overall, the first big change for network architecture is peer-to-peer traffic, and this is continuing to grow - we expect at 35% per year. And the other aspect that is driving this is video."Technology like Cisco's carrier routing system (known as "CRS-1") can scale to more than a Terabit per second and as a result, Krahmer expects that networks will be able to keep up with loads and scale bandwidth all the way to the consumer. As well, ratification of DOCSIS 3.0 (data over cable service interface specifications) allows for 100 Megabits per second to pass through current cable infrastructure."But you will still need to prioritize," insists Krahmer. "If you watch IPTV in the living room, you don't want the teenager doing P2P downstairs to degrade the screen image."This is doable because P2P is not real-time. From Krahmer's perspective, the discussion around net neutrality then loses weight. "The truth is that those that manage bandwidth well get higher customer satisfaction ratings," he says.Cable companies, DSL providers and wireless operators aren't all just looking at broadband intelligence applications, such as those offered by Sandvine - they are also building out additional capacity. In the United States, XO Communications is doubling its network capacity in 2008 and AT&T confirmed that total network spending in 2007 - much of which went to upgrading the transport layer - was US$18.5 billion. Canada's carriers also in the process of expensive network expansions with the big telcos committing about $1 billion each. Capacity expansion and traffic prioritization represent a perfect storm where technological advances and corporate policy are colliding with predictable results. Bandwidth is becoming commodified and less valuable, and the carriers have yet to find a way to drive sufficient revenue from value-added services. For Mike Lee, chief strategy officer for Rogers, as bandwidth increases in combination with improved compression and shaping software, the business model will change. "At a certain level you get to a point where it is fast enough for anybody," he says. "But there are still tiers of customers. Some only want a relatively limited amount of access, in terms of time on the network, as well as speed. And when we get to the point where we will exceed the maximum type of usage in terms of speed, then we'll differentiate according to other issues."However, we aren't there yet. We are at a crossroads, where investments in infrastructure and software capabilities for the delivery of new services such as IPTV co-exist with a subscription-based business model."HD video service is limited now," says Lee. "Until we get the masses moving into the network and taking advantage of high end apps we won't know what household usage looks like." It is also true that speed is only one issue - there are technologies that are more sensitive to latency, such as gaming and on-demand applications.All this talk of tiered usage is cause for some concern to Michael Geist, a law professor at the University of Ottawa and Canada Research Chair in Internet and E-commerce Law. "From a purely regulatory basis carriers have the right to shape traffic. However, there is some legislation in the Telecom Act that refers to no discrimination, and there remains doubt that those provisions are effective in light of the traffic shaping and net neutrality violations we are seeing."Geist acknowledges that carriers make infrastructure investments and have a right to pursue profitability for their shareholders - he just doesn't believe the extent to which those rights might trump the rights of individual citizens."Canada has long recognized that our infrastructure is critical, and telecom providers have been the beneficiaries of so much protection for so long. As well, innovation on the Internet has been built on a foundation that treats content by and large in an equal fashion," he says. It's an opinion not likely to be shared by carriers on the frontlines trying to manage application spikes in the IP stream to deliver enough bandwidth for services like HDTV. Lee at Rogers suggests concerns around invasive traffic shaping are overstated, adding that carriers are in a constant state of flux and adaptation. "If we were in a steady state this would be a simpler problem," he says. "The challenge is that at the protocol and user application level things are always changing. And network management tools are always the last to be developed - the first are the enabling technologies."Good examples are the recent advances in wireless technology. Although ultra-wide band (UWB), 802.11n, and femtocells can deliver more bandwidth indoors, they may add further complications, in part because the hardware companies that develop these technologies do not have the software capabilities."The issue becomes: how much education at the consumer level is required to manage that complexity?" says Lee. "The problem with delivering wireless bandwidth to home networks is that there is no visibility at the application layer, no data coming back from the network. You spend your time plugging and unplugging things. To deliver bandwidth on the consumer side wireless has to be very simple, standardized, and foolproof."

Carriers take steps to solve bandwidth crunch

News | 01/16/2008 8:37 pm EST

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