Controlling Bandwidth: Stick or Carrot?

We continue to hear a lot in the ongoing efforts of service providers and cable MSOs to keep residential bandwidth hogs under control. Peer-to-peer traffic seems to be the most often sighted culprit, but it’s clear that YouTube and other video feeds in on-demand format are causing a serious dent as well. Recently Cisco published its predictions that 90 percent of all IP traffic will be video content by 2012.

This makes sense if you’ve ever used a peer-to-peer application to share or download files – often the download limit reflects your client’s upload rate setting, which most users don’t crank up very far so that they can still maintain reasonable control over their connection. So moderation and peer-to-peer may not be considered partners, but the user experience of other apps suffers when you get too greedy, so in a practical sense it’s a self moderating situation.

Video, on the other hand, is a different animal. In fact, if YouTube was the only source of the problem, as a service provider you might choose to regulate bandwidth from YouTube.com in a very non-net neutrality kind of way and succeed at maintaining precious network performance for the obedient majority of Web surfers. But even the older surfers that have never visited YouTube are also part of this phenomenon, albeit indirectly: through e-mail attachments.

I have one particular retired uncle who (it appears) spends a good deal of his day looking up funny videos, PowerPoint Shows, and jokes to send to the 30-plus people on his e-mail list (and there’s no way to opt-out!) – all as attachments. Hyperlinks escape some people. I cringe each time I open one of his e-mails to see “attachment.wmv, 4534kb” that downloaded with the e-mail. Imagine the amount of wasted Internet bandwidth if he does this five times a day to his 30 friends: 5 x 30 x 4.5Mb = 675MB a day! Repeat this behavior for all the friends, uncles, aunts, grandparents, kids and colleagues we know and you end up with a migraine-worth of consumption. Add to that all the forwarded e-mails that just keep this stuff rotating around the globe at the speed of light!

Power Shortage = Bandwidth Shortage?

Here in Montreal, where I live, the Hydro Quebec power utility might have found an incentive-based solution for power consumption that could be applied to curtail 80 percent of this extra data transmission. It’s called the dual-energy program and works like this:

1. Hydro Quebec installs a new electric meter on your house (at their expense) that has a two-tiered rate system.

2. When there is very high power consumption in their network (very cold nights and mornings in winter), a little green light comes on in your house next to your thermostat indicating you are now on the second-tier (more expensive) rate.

3. The meter tells your furnace (dual-energy model) to automatically switch to alternate energy (gas, natural gas, propane, etc.) thereby greatly reducing your power consumption during these periods.

4. If you also choose to further reduce electricity usage during this time (like running your dryer or dishwasher later at night) you’ll save even more money.

5. For periods not in peak demand you end up paying about 60 percent of the normal power rate (first tier).

What’s amazing about this is that if you’re on the plan, you’ll normally save more than 30 percent a year in overall energy costs, with almost no inconvenience. All it takes is awareness and a bit of automation – plus a financial reward –to make people flock to it.

So how will this help your broadband pipeline woes? Why not offer a similar plan for bandwidth? This means a carrot, not a stick: Offer a discount on users’ broadband bills if they don’t exceed certain usage limits during peak times of day. A small applet on your PC could easily let users know when it’s time to slow down, and measure how much they use. Since you’re not penalizing people for usage – you’re rewarding them for “good behavior” – I’m guessing price-sensitive users (younger ones with less budget and using the most bandwidth) would be most likely to give it a try.

Going back to my uncle’s ambitious hobby, it wouldn’t be that hard for all of his relatives to cut back on bandwidth. If everyone turned off the “download attachments” setting in their e-mail program (or used Web-based mail) and only downloaded what they really wanted, they’d save a lot of pipe.

This is just a thought, surely one that will add to the growing debate and heated opinions around this topic. It’s a funny thing that people just can’t crack this one. Maybe we have to stop thinking like a provider and start thinking like a user.

In the enterprise space, traffic shaping and application acceleration are hot topics these days; increasingly, businesses are taking traffic conditioning into their own hands to save money and improve performance over limited-bandwidth connections. With the introduction of zero-latency shaping (as an example, see the video at Accedian.com/shaping), and everything from byte caching to DPI available to IT staff, they’re clambering to apply techniques that would put MSOs back in the headlines.

Next post, I’ll give a window into how some enterprises have taken advantage of a variety of acceleration techniques to make sure they get the most out of their VPNs, showing how it’s real easy to find ways to economize on bandwidth – if you have the motivation. It’s the carrot, not the stick.

Scott Sumner is vice president of marketing at Accedian Networks, which provides Packet Performance Assurance solutions that enable carrier-grade, packet-based applications over wireless and wireline networks.

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