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P2P could be the end of flat-rate broadband, sound familiar?
The issue of P2P was raised again at the Internet Service Providers (ISPs)
forum in London this week by P2P management equipment vendor
Sandvine. They
claim ISP's are reviewing how they sell and package their products due to ever
increasing P2P usage.
Since ISP's have to pay a heavier price for most P2P traffic as it does not
originate from their own network, Sandvine claim this is driving ISP's to
alternative pricing models. The difficulty with this, they admit, that the end
user is unhappy about port throttling and download capping, so a pricing
structure similar to
Metronet where the price is related to the amount of data
downloaded, is seen as a possible future.
Currently 55% of broadband traffic comes from just 5% of the users, but
rather than targeting them Sandvine claim ISP's are planning changes in the pricing structure.
| "None is going public with this yet
because there is a real risk they could lose customers, but 10 are
thinking about introducing application intelligent services rather than
using the speed-equals-price business model," |
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Chris Colman,
Sandvine's EMEA managing director |
These thoughts were echoed by and AOL
spokesperson who said,
"P2P is clearly an issue for ISPs.
Judging what goes beyond what is reasonable usage and what impacts on
other users is difficult, but as more people go online with broadband it
is entirely possible that different packages will be introduced.
"It is not on the agenda for AOL at the moment because people are happy
with the flat-rate model and are still getting to grips with broadband.
But you could see ISPs bringing in different products next year." |
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AOL spokesman |
All of this may just be speculation as the P2P
problem has been with us for several years now with ISP's seemly accepting the
status quo, but with the ever increasing broadband take-up things may start to
change, only time will tell.
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![ISP's [General]](images/topics/isp.png)
