P2P could spell the end of flat rate broadband in UK

March 1, 2004

Consumer flat-rate broadband packages in the UK could be replaced by tiered broadband services as soon as next year. Last week, at the Internet Service Providers (ISPs) forum in London, peer-to-peer (P2P) management equipment vendor Sandvine claimed that UK ISPs are taking a hard look at the situation now.

Broadband service is presently based on the amount of bandwidth a customer wants to buy, anywhere from 150Kbps to 2Mbps, these agreements generally have no cap on the amount of data. As we all know, P2P traffic puts a strain on the networks as huge amounts of data is being transferred between clients. Along with that go higher costs for the providers. Under consideration are unpopular measures such as port throttling P2P sites, data download limits or pay-as-you-go pricing. Needless to say, the ISP's are reluctant to talk about the use any of these methods. Tech News World let it slip though.

"None is going public with this yet because there is a real risk they could lose customers, but 10 are thinking about introducing application intelligent services rather than using the speed-equals-price business model," said Chris Colman, Sandvine's EMEA managing director.
Currently, only around five per cent of broadband subscribers are deemed heavy users, but they account for 55 per cent of broadband traffic.

But ISPs expect the number of heavy users to grow as more people choose broadband for P2P applications.

A spokesman for AOL (NYSE: AOL) said: "P2P is clearly an issue for ISPs. Judging what goes beyond what is reasonable usage and what impacts on other users is difficult, but as more people go online with broadband it is entirely possible that different packages will be introduced.
"It is not on the agenda for AOL at the moment because people are happy with the flat-rate model and are still getting to grips with broadband. But you could see ISPs bringing in different products next year."

The delivery of broadband has conjured up uses for the
available bandwidth. Go figure. Besides P2P, the advent of broadband has been a
blessing to those that create software and patches, serving up both online and
saving a bundle in the meantime. Service packs for XP are a killer, game demos
are massive in size, daily video card driver updates, not to mention the CD Freaks Forum. 😉 Linux buff? Brace yourself for a bigger cable bill. The rising popularity of legal download sites and usenet can eat up a quota quickly as well. So lets not put all the blame on P2P - the red headed stepchild of the Internet.

Source: Tech News World