TORONTO – Peer-to-peer file sharing is no longer the number one concern for cable company engineers managing their IP networks as web surfing – thanks to the growing popularity of streaming video – has taken over as the top consumer of bandwidth.
Shaw Cable’s director of Internet systems engineering, David Wodelet, during a session Tuesday morning on Internet capacity management at the SCTE Canadian Summit at the Toronto Congress Centre, noted that “P2P is on the decline… web traffic has now exceeded P2P,” thanks to the likes of YouTube, Google Video and myriad other sites where high quality video can be viewed. (The problem is even more acute Stateside where so many more sites with thousands of hours of video, like Hulu, can be accessed that are geo-blocked here.)
Wodelet said that while traffic shaping is possible with P2P, it simply can’t be done with a stream of video playing on a web site because a video file being uploaded or downloaded is not nearly as interactive as someone actively watching a TV show or other video online.
“P2P was an easy target because it was the biggest target and mostly non-interactive,” he added. “P2P rate shaping is going to disappear eventually because it is being eclipsed by web traffic… and we can’t rate-shape that because it impacts the user experience.”
MSOs definitely do not want their call centres swamped because their customers’ web video experience suddenly goes into herky-jerky mode.
Instead, cable companies across North America have been introducing tiered services, where big bandwidth users will have to pay more. And it’s not like those moves affect a lot of customers who are now going to have to pay up if they want to keep using lots of bandwidth.
Wodelet pointed out that the top 1% of Shaw’s high speed Internet customers use 15% of available bandwidth and the top 5% to 10% of users actually use half of the available bandwidth.
“So we’re really dealing with a small set of customers,” he said.
Until 2007, Rogers Cable only loosely enforced its usage caps – generally set at 60 GB per month. And it only acted when a portion of a network was being negatively impacted by a user, said Tony Faccia, the company’s vice-president, networks and capacity planning.
Since then, however, the company has created a number of tiers at various rates per month, including the top-end “Extreme”, 95 GB/month plan for $103. It also sent out literature in 2008 noting the launch of additional usage billing on each of its five tiers of broadband service, starting at about $1 for each GB more for Extreme, and higher per additional GB for the lower cost tiers.
The maximum any customer can see in AUB charges in a month is $25 more.
What Rogers found, said Faccia, is that customers began to clean up their systems and limit their use of the network simply based on being warned it might cost them more.
“Customers checked for viruses and made sure their wireless networks were secure so it wasn’t their neighbours using their bandwidth,” said Faccia, explaining some of the measures taken by Rogers customers.
“We saw an immediate and significant impact on the network – a net reduction of overall consumption… Rogers is extremely pleased with the launch of additional use billing… There was little evidence of churn – even though there was some increase in cost (thanks to a few more calls to the call centres),” said Faccia.
