[AusNOG] News: Telstra to clamp down on peer-to-peer

[Tony]

>________________________________
> From: Mark Smith <markzzzsmith at yahoo.com.au>
>To: Phillip Grasso <phillip.grasso at gmail.com>; Joshua D'Alton <joshua at railgun.com.au> 
>Cc: "AusNOG at lists.ausnog.net" <ausnog at lists.ausnog.net> 
>Sent: Thursday, 7 February 2013 6:31 AM
>Subject: Re: [AusNOG] News: Telstra to clamp down on peer-to-peer
> 
>
>Given the dramatic increases in access circuit speed that the NBN is going to provide, I think these protocol aware traffic throttling devices are only going to become more common.
>


If you've got a DSLAM with a few hundred ports (how many ports would the average Telstra DSLAM have ?) and you upgrade the DSLAM to be ADSL2 so that each line is capable of 20Mbps, you then have a potential demand for 4Gbps of traffic (200 x 20, yes ignoring that all lines won't sync at 20M). If the backhaul to your DSLAM is only GigE fibre and it's starting to congest what do you do ? You have two options:

1. Upgrade backhaul. Telstra more than likely has the fibre to do it, but upgrading to 10G would be a costly exercise I imagine. You have to replace cards in all of your DSLAM if that is even possible with the model DSLAMs they have.

2. Shape/throttle/limit the traffic that is causing you to exceed the backhaul capacity


If your backhaul isn't even GigE and is instead an OC3 (155Mbps) or OC12 (622Mbps) then they would be hitting the congestion sooner.


>Perhaps one way to make the "P2P'ers" happy would be to use these DPI devices to mark this traffic as scavenger class, and then give it to them for free, or some how making it much much cheaper e.g. 1/10th of the price of non-scavenger class traffic, filling up the "white space" in the network when capacity is unused. ISPs would then be getting some form of value return on their normally unutilised link capacity.

If they do it properly and only limit the speed on stuff that people can't complain about (ie. not quite legit things) then nobody will complain and Telstra can put off upgrading backhaul. This comes back to the majority of users not noticing because their web browsing (youtube, facbook, itunes, etc) isn't impacted and might actually get faster.


With the NBN rolling out and people shifting to other technologies (NBN, wireless or Telstra/Optus cable) the backhaul demand for DSLAMs might taper off and drop in the next 2-5 years so perhaps Telstra see the prospect of an expensive 10G backhaul upgrade as a loss and this option as the better one. Sure if your demand is going to keep increasing then you're just putting off the inevitable, but if your forecast shows that your demand is only going to increase by another 20% then drop off again, why not look at options to put off having to upgrade because it's just a wasted investment that you'll never recoup.



regards,
Tony.