News

Sandvine Report Should Raise Doubt About Traffic Management Practices

Mark Goldberg points to a recent Sandvine broadband report on recent broadband traffic patterns. Goldberg points to the growth of real-time entertainment traffic, such as streaming, which is consistent with what the CRTC heard during the net neutrality hearings over the summer.  Most notable, however, is yet another confirmation that P2P traffic is declining as a percentage of overall traffic.  Sandvine reports that it dropped by 25 percent as a share of overall traffic.  Moreover, in a table on peak-time bandwidth share, Sandvine reports that web browsing leads (34.4%), followed by real-time entertainment (29.1%), and then P2P (16.9%).  Sandvine also reports that peak-time usage is narrowing.  In 2008, peak-time ran from 6:00 to 11:00 pm.  In 2009, Sandvine said it has narrowed to 7:00 to 10:00 pm.

This data is important in considering the test established by the CRTC for reasonable traffic management practices.  First, practices that target P2P will be increasingly difficult to justify (many argue application-specific approaches are never justifiable), given its declining share of traffic the application represents.  Second, far broader peak-time characterizations – Bell claims that its peak-time runs from 4:30 pm to 2:00 am – are unlikely to meet the CRTC's standard for any harm from traffic management practices being as little as reasonably possible.

10 Comments

  1. Sandvine Report Should Raise Doubt About Traffic Management Practices
    Interesting, the the problem being Sandvine’s definition of peak and Bell’s definition of peak could be vastly different.
    After all with a severely under provisioned network, overloading and therefore the “peak”, “extreme” or whatever usage is going to occur over a longer period.

    This report probably is not relevant anyway, since the CRTC seems to take the word of Bell et al. and conveniently avoid such reports or other annoyances by further reducing the scope of their ever narrowing tunnel vision.

  2. When I looked at the report, they do break it down some by region. For instance, in North America the P2P bandwidth was ~19% during peak times. The numbers mentioned above are the global numbers. I didn’t find a “peak time” definition for North America; it could be quite different from the 7 to 10 pm globally. While useful, the report I saw didn’t contain sufficient information to conclude that what applies globally is also applicable in Canada, much less North America.

    Take the report for what it is; just be careful about reading too much into it.

  3. theninjasquad says:

    Can we then challenge Bells throttling based on this to have it reviewed by the CRTC?

  4. Now that there are some LEGAL WAYS
    To stream old TV shows, the p2p is dropping. Now that they have also added some ways to get things that sell in other countries in our country via download, the amount of p2p for that has dropped as well.
    Another reason for the drop in p2p is simply that the prices for some games/movies/music have come down because of the economic slowdown…. the idiots at these companies finally realized that people were NOT going to pay 20 dollars for a DVD the first week it is out anymore, and lowered that price to 5-10 dollars.

    People like myself who talk with the network management people for Comcast and AT&T have also known for YEARS that p2p was not the biggest portion of network usage. Yes, p2p people are heavier users than MOST…. but the heaviest users, eclipsing p2p by a significant proportion, are business users.
    That’s why the period of biggest ‘congestion’ on the networks is 9-5.

  5. Sandvine
    Considering Sandvine now has their hardware on 30% of the worlds nodes this is a pretty scary thought.. Based on what I have been seeing in Canada it appears BellRogers have succeeded in changing user patterns usage and habits..

    If any net neutrality type rules came into Canada.. Sandvine would be out of business locally..

  6. Bell and Rogers
    Don’t think for a second that Bell and Rogers wont turn this into a massive thumbs up.. They will PR it saying oh ye our throttling with Sandvine is helping us so much.. bla bla blah..

  7. Encryption…
    I guess they don’t/can’t tell when the traffic is encrypted.

  8. ari goldberg says:

    rogers and bell are just BAD FOR CANADA
    its just the truth
    but they play the legal game well
    sad to see
    u.s.a. has much more open standards

  9. Money Management
    we believe strongly in fighting against the con you list — “These project management apps are here to save you time, but they can also be very time-consuming and not intuitive.” We have strived for simplicity over some of the flashy features of the other tools, while making sure to still include everything you need. Check us out and sign up for a free trial today. We’d love to hear from you.
    http://www.financeandmarkets.net/

  10. Debt Management
    People like myself who talk with the network management people for Comcast and AT&T have also known for YEARS that p2p was not the biggest portion of network usage. Yes, p2p people are heavier users than MOST…. but the heaviest users, eclipsing p2p by a significant proportion, are business users.
    That’s why the period of biggest ‘congestion’ on the networks is 9-5.
    http://www.edebtmanagement.net/