Broadband data put spotlight back on application-specific traffic management

Two findings in Sandvine Inc.’s 2009 global wireline broadband report are stirring the traffic management debate: P2P filesharing has dropped by 25% as a share of total traffic, and peak hours condensed to 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. in 2009, from 6 p.m. to 11 p.m. in 2008. The biggest slice of the bandwidth pie these days, it seems, is being eaten by real-time video streaming. “The first thing that comes to mind is that usage is both evolving and increasing,” says Tom Copeland, the chairman Canadian Association of Internet Providers (CAIP). The top three broadband traffic areas for North America were: web-browsing 36.9%, real-time entertainment 26.7%, and P2P filesharing at 18.5%. Sandvine does not break out Canadian-specific data, but claims the North American data accurately reflect the Canadian experience. “If we saw something dramatically different in Canada we would have shown it,” says Dave Caputo, Sandvine’s co-founder, president and CEO. At a global level, P2P filesharing declined by 25% as a share of total traffic, to account for just over 20% of total bytes. However, the decline is not consistent in every region – North America experienced a 20% relative decline. Given that these data also apply to Canada, it has called into question the traffic shaping practices of some Canadian carriers. “We have always maintained that the problem Bell Canada was trying to overcome – network congestion – isn’t caused by applications, but by users,” says Copeland. But Sandvine can point to the increase in use of real-time applications and argue that P2P, given its tolerance for latency, should still be managed to the back of the queue. “You have to acknowledge that there are periods of congestion,” says Caputo. “You can predict it for 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. every night, but it might also be event driven – Obama’s inauguration, or Michael Jackson’s death. There is a fair way and an unfair way: the fair way it to intelligently prioritize latency and jitter-sensitive traffic.” But for Copeland and the members of CAIP, the carriers have used these concerns to cast too wide a net. “To the best of our knowledge, Bell is maintaining a very broad definition of peak traffic from 4:30 p.m. to 2 a.m. We always thought that was a little extreme – at 2 a.m. in Ontario and Quebec peak traffic is behind us by many hours.” Mark Goldberg of Mark H. Goldberg and Associates, who recently published an industry-sponsored report on broadband penetration and pricing that was generally favourable to Canada’s big service providers, says that the Sandvine report has “plenty of interesting observations” and “plenty of fascinating implications for networks and policy makers”. But Michael Geist, Canada Research Chair in Internet and E-commerce Law at the University of Ottawa, is more pointed in his analysis of the implications of this report, writing recently that “practices that target P2P will be increasingly difficult to justify” and that “far broader peak-time characterizations...are unlikely to meet the CRTC's standard for any harm from traffic management practices being as little as reasonably possible.” Bell could counter that Sandvine did not specifically define peak time in Canada, and that the Canadian data could be quite different from the global aggregate of 7 to 10 p.m. But Sandvine’s president noted above, if the North American – or Canadian – data skewed greatly from the overall reported numbers, it would have been highlighted in the report. In other words, the company consider 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. to be a fair definition of peak traffic in Canada. It also sees it as highly significant. “This is a massive shift,” says Caputo. “Last year’s peak was from 6 p.m. to 11 p.m., and this year we are at 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. What is driving this is that although P2P filesharing is still growing, its share of bandwidth is declining. What is pegging the network now is real-time video streaming, and people are watching that between 7 p.m. and 10 p.m.” Copeland agrees that there is an increasing need to pay attention to real-time traffic. “If today you are still throttling P2P, thinking that that will have a significant impact on congestion, then – if the Sandvine stats are true – you might be misadvised, because usage has shifted, P2P is not the darling it was 18 months ago, and congestion problems could be coming back.”

Broadband data put spotlight back on application-specific traffic management

News | 11/20/2009 5:59 pm EST

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