31 Aug 2005 - Darknets will make conventional bandwidth management obsolete

Encrypted P2P will soon make bandwidth management based on deep packet inspection obsolete, predicts Staselog Ltd.

Today, 80% of all traffic in the Internet is already P2P. The traffic will increase 1000-fold in 5 years, and most of it will be encrypted P2P. This will cause a significant need for a new approach to bandwidth management. Currently, the operators commonly reduce P2P traffic in their networks due to P2P's capability to occupy all given bandwidth, for sake of transfer efficiency and reliability. The conventional bandwidth management appliances are designed for this detection and traffic reduction process.

According to Freenet's Ian Clarke, the next generation P2P will get common this year. These so called darknets use encryption and are undetectable.

"P2P reduction is a poor policy anyway. There will be lots of legal and popular services available running on P2P technology. People are willing to pay for the content, and the required high quality transfer. There is an urgent need for the broadband operators to reconsider their P2P policy, and we have the solution", says Jarkko Niittylahti, the managing director of Staselog Ltd, and gives an example. "Skype will become even more popular, when it gets live video, requiring a hundred times more bandwidth than a voice call alone".

Sony is the first large media company that entered this new market recently.

Staselog Ltd is a Finnish company designing next generation bandwidth management appliances for wired and wireless networks.

Contact information:

Dr. Jarkko Niittylahti +358 50 465 4884

Mr. Teppo Tomann +358 50 465 4886