[IP] In Japan, P2P usage grows with bandwidth

[David Farber <dave@farber.net>]

________________________________________
From: Brett Glass [brett@lariat.net]
Sent: Monday, March 03, 2008 2:12 PM
To: David Farber; Ip ip
Subject: In Japan, P2P usage grows with bandwidth

Dave:

An interesting tidbit for IP, if you will. ZDNet technical editor
George Ou reported today on his trip to Capitol Hill, where he
participated in a panel on network management issues. Also on the
panel was an official from Japan, which has more high bandwidth
links to the home than any other nation on Earth. George reports on
Japan's experience:

>Next up was Mr. Haruka Saito from the Embassy of Japan.  Mr. Saito
>explained that Japan had been studying and debating the issue of
>Network Neutrality in Japan for about a year and a half and he
>offered a lot of hard data gathered in Japan.  Japan is one of if
>not the most connected nation in the world when it comes to
>broadband deployment with 100 Mbps fiber deployments and despite
>this abundance of capacity, even I was shocked that they were
>running into congestion problems.
>
>When the traffic chart was broken down in to color-coded regions
>showing application usage, P2P easily ate the lion's share of
>resources and dwarfed everything else on the chart.  Mr. Saito
>went on to explain that 1% of the users primarily through P2P
>consumed around 50% of the total capacity and this pretty much
>mirrors every other study I've seen elsewhere in the world
>regardless of capacity.  The debate in Japan was who was going to
>pay for this excessive usage and whether the heaviest users should
>start paying more money.

In short, the Japanese experience is that P2P usage grows with
added capacity so that it continues to consume a disproportionate
share of available bandwidth.

For the complete text of George's article, see:

http://blogs.zdnet.com/Ou/?p=1039

--Brett Glass


-------------------------------------------