[ NNSquad ] In Japan, P2P usage grows with bandwidth

[Brett Glass <brett@lariat.net>]

An interesting tidbit the list. ZDNet technical editor George Ou 
reported today on his trip to Capitol Hill, where he participated 
in a panel on network management issues. Also on the panel was an 
official from Japan, which has more high bandwidth links to the 
home than any other nation on Earth. George reports on Japan's experience:

> Next up was Mr. Haruka Saito from the Embassy of Japan.  Mr. Saito 
> explained that Japan had been studying and debating the issue of 
> Network Neutrality in Japan for about a year and a half and he 
> offered a lot of hard data gathered in Japan.  Japan is one of if 
> not the most connected nation in the world when it comes to 
> broadband deployment with 100 Mbps fiber deployments and despite 
> this abundance of capacity, even I was shocked that they were 
> running into congestion problems.
>
> When the traffic chart was broken down in to color-coded regions 
> showing application usage, P2P easily ate the lion's share of 
> resources and dwarfed everything else on the chart.  Mr. Saito 
> went on to explain that 1% of the users primarily through P2P 
> consumed around 50% of the total capacity and this pretty much 
> mirrors every other study I've seen elsewhere in the world 
> regardless of capacity.  The debate in Japan was who was going to 
> pay for this excessive usage and whether the heaviest users should 
> start paying more money.

In short, the Japanese experience is that P2P usage grows with 
added capacity so that it continues to consume a disproportionate 
share of available bandwidth.

For the complete text of George's article, see:

http://blogs.zdnet.com/Ou/?p=1039

--Brett Glass

  [ This is interesting, but doesn't really move the ball.  Within a
    decade, perhaps in just a few years, we may well see *legal*
    video as the biggest single consumer of bandwidth.  Whether
    transmitted by P2P or some other means, consumers are going to
    demand access to the vast range of video services -- many of
    which will be HD -- that are even now being rapidly deployed.
    ISPs will view these as direct competition to their own PPV and
    free entertainment offerings.  Then we're not talking about the
    *relatively* small universe of P2P fans, but large streams
    pouring in and out of the majority of consumer homes.
  
    P2P as bogeyman isn't going to fly.  Just as programs have expanded
    to fill available memory and data expands to fill available disk 
    space, applications -- many of which will be encrypted -- will expand
    into available bandwidth.  Call the applications what you will,
    but it won't matter.

    This all implies that concentrating controls on a per-application
    basis will be hopeless in the end, and that overall bandwidth
    utilization and fairness is a much more fruitful area for attention.

      -- Lauren Weinstein
         NNSquad Moderator ]