Traffic Control & Capacity Management

Peer-to-Peer Traffic Control Challenge

The growing number of broadband subscribers, along with the dominance of bandwidth-hungry Internet applications (i.e., peer-to-peer, file sharing, streaming media) can represent up to 70% of network traffic, and greatly impact the performance and profit equation for carriers.

Peer-to-peer originating from internal carrier customers creates high broadband demand, while having to support the resulting uplink traffic shared with external peers, it hogs local-loop uplink bandwidth and competes against carrier premium services without generating any new revenues.

Providers that respond to congestion by adding links and bandwidth realize they are adding capacity at a rate that far exceeds subscriber growth and find that the additional capacity is immediately consumed without seeing the expected improvement in performance. The result is dramatically escalated operational costs without any commensurate increase in revenue.

The ability to inspect, classify and engineer all ingress traffic has emerged as a key tool for carrier bandwidth control and the foundation for optimized and profitable carrier service delivery.