Internet

P2P/BitTorrent fall on hard times

P2P may be falling on hard times in at least one sense; BitTorrent confirmed a 20% layoff but said the move had nothing to do with the Comcast throttling issue. In some ways it would have been better for the company had Comcast been the culprit, since the FCC has ruled that Comcast can’t strangle a particular type of traffic.

We believe that the real problem is that there is little BitTorrent can do to rehab the image of P2P, which our research and modeling shows is used for illegal file sharing in more than 90% of cases. It’s ironic the giant of P2P is now suffering, given that the telcos are at the same time looking at P2P signaling architectures as an alternative to centralized signaling systems like IMS. Recent rumors say that operators are researching the use of a P2P architecture for delivering “rich service signaling” without the need for a central signaling system and without the limitations of SIP/SDP/IMS.

Report on IP traffic growth greatly exaggerated?

UBS has released a sector report on telecom that suggests that the slowing IP traffic growth will threaten router vendors. While the firm has long taken a rather bearish stance on the industry, this seems more alarming and less justified than most positions.

We know of no credible reports of slowing IP traffic growth; in fact, the increased deployment of high-speed broadband seems to promise the opposite. However, beneath its questionable main thesis is an essential truth, which is that while IP traffic growth may not be slowing, the IP revenue ramp is definitely slowing. Service providers, like everyone else, invest for profits, and revenue per bit has been declining.

We have seen pitch after pitch from the service providers talking about their strategies for transformation, but we have also heard these same providers tell us that their barrier today is equipment vendors that have not followed up on operators’ published strategies. The trend toward usage pricing and caps, and traffic metering, are all related to the need to curtail costs to match revenue potential. If equipment vendors want to continue to sell gear, they need to step up in the NGN revenue game, not just push boxes.

Sprint readies for IPv6, federal mandate or not

The Federal government agency mandate to run IPv6 by the summer of 2008 is now approaching, and Sprint at least is planning to be ready in case the government actually goes through with what it has mandates, far from a sure thing. IPv6 is a new version of IP that has considerably more address space, enough to address all the devices on the Internet and PSTN with room to spare. The problem is that it requires changes in the network and user equipment to use. It is expected that it will roll out commercially in a gradual way, and that IPv6 may not be really used universally on the Internet for a decade.

Dueling Cisco/Juniper Ethernet switch rumors

Rumors continue to spin around a new Juniper enterprise Ethernet switch and a competing Cisco product launched, not surprisingly, at about the same time. As we reported last week, financial analysts were predicting that Juniper would launch its Ethernet switch on January 29th in New York at a meeting scheduled for the financial and media communities, and Cisco has traditionally worked to trump competitive announcements by making one of their own just before that date. All of this is aimed at the larger “data center” or enterprise headquarters market, a market that in 2008 may be more challenging than it was in 2007 according to our research.

Net neutrality at heart of Internet capacity issue

The study commissioned by the Internet Innovation Alliance that showed the Internet running out of capacity by the next decade is coming under criticism as favoring the telco perspective. We believe that the study’s conclusions on Internet capacity shortfall are likely inaccurate since they do not take into account the metro nature of most content traffic and the impact of CDNs. However, we do believe that the Internet is threatened by an imbalance of demand and supply created by the over-the-top players and the all-you-can-eat pricing model. The issue is at the heart of the net neutrality debate, but public policy to prevent access and Internet providers from earning a fair ROI would simply stifle broadband deployment. It is clear that work is needed to develop a useful balance of interest here.

Internet traffic growth could be $150 billion problem

A study predicts that the unbridled downloading of content will increase Internet and broadband access traffic to the point where serious slowdowns could occur by 2010, and an investment of nearly $150B would be required to fix the problem. The exact numbers and dates here may require some justification, but the overall problem cited is real. The challenge with the current Internet model is that there is no financial back-pressure against multiplying traffic, which also means that there is no incremental revenue associated with that traffic. The pure over-the-top model risks a separation of “return” from “investment” and that means that even if these numbers are true there may be little or no incentive for the operators to spend the kind of dollars suggested. The suggestion that “something must be done” may be valid, but there has to be a commercial framework created that permits investment or nothing will be done.

Doubts about consumer demand for bandwidth

Research is casting doubt on the notion that consumer demand will explode bandwidth needs, a story promulgated by Cisco and others. Skeptics note that in mature markets where high speed is available, traffic grows at about 18% per year. We agree with the notion that traffic explosions are highly overrated, but we believe that some of the conclusions that the more conservative camp draw from their numbers are also off the mark. There is little doubt that the growth in Internet traffic alone will not drive bandwidth growth by much more than 20% per year in most markets, and will likely do less in many. There is also little doubt that consumers will increase their consumption of non-Internet (meaning content video) traffic through substitution of downloading or streaming video versus traditional TV viewing. The question not yet resolved is how these truths will balance over time. We also note that the current rate of revenue-per-bit decline is faster than the rate of traffic growth, which is what apparently leads some to the conclusion that providers should be encouraging more bits to be used. That’s not a reasonable assumption; commoditization of bit pricing is the problem even today.

State of the Internet angst - again

More angst about the state of the Internet is reported in the WSJ as key players in the development of the Net step up and talk about the directions things are taking, including the “parallel universe” approach that we have advocated since the middle 1990s. The notion is that commercial pressure for profit and traffic growth will combine to create parallel networks that will tap off premium handling for premium fees. This model is very similar to one that network operators worldwide are developing through mechanisms like the IPsphere Forum.

Relevant Reading
Wall Street Journal