Controlling the Network in a DMCA World

As the RIAA and the movie studios promulgate their laws in nations around the world, service providers will need to know what applications their users are running, and when.

by Alex Goldman ISP-Planet Associate Editor [July 7, 2003]

Sunnyvale, Calif.-based P-Cube announced that its software now provides complete ABC functionality, where ABC stands for "Analyze, Bill, and Control." Analysis is provided by the company's Engage software, Billing by its Encharge software, and Control by its Insight software.

Vikash Varma, P-Cube vice president of worldwide sales, said that Engage analyzes data up to layer 7, allowing service providers to understand what applications are running.

The analysis comprises all the data, not just part of it. "We use exhaustive data," says Varma, "not just sampling."

This data allows service providers to bill for a variety of services.

"Billing systems can do two things badly," notes Varma. "They can drop packets so that they don't bill customers at all, and they can bill customers twice for one use." Encharge feeds streams of data records into mediation systems like HP's HP-IUM (Internet Usage Manager). P-Cube feeds accurate data to mediation systems. The mediation systems aggregate the data, correlate the data to a particular user, and reformat the data for the billing system. The billing system then determines prices, taxes, and generates the bill itself.

The Control software, Insight, is a highly scalable reporting and shaping engine. Explains Varma, "there are three types of control used at ISPs today. ISPs redirect traffic (perhaps to a website saying "you haven't paid for this service"), they throttle traffic (limiting, for example, P2P traffic at peak hours), and they block traffic.

He adds that ISPs' best customers tend to also be the heaviest users of bandwidth. "Also, contrary to popular belief, much P2P traffic is not audio, it's adult video."

Managing P2P traffic has become more difficult as the P2P clients became more intelligent. "You used to throttle specific ports. Now, protocols like Kazaa Lite are intelligent enough to hide behind HTTP traffic. If you look at the port level only, you'll miss this Kazaa Lite traffic. There's a P2P client called WinNY, a variant of WinMX, that uses all encrypted traffic. It's so sophisticated that it might have been designed by a team of lawyers and hackers."

The bottom line, says Varma, is that service providers are cutting costs. "As long as it's a cost issue, you want to avoid expensive surgery if you can solve the problem with Advil."

Network control in Singapore
We spoke to one satisfied P-Cube customer, Benny Chee, senior network engineer at SingTel, Singapore's ILEC. Singapore is a nation but it is essentially one carefully managed city. With a massive number of knowledge workers, this city state is an ideal market for broadband. With a population of 4,452,732 at last count, SingTel's 130,000 broadband subscribers represent about 6 percent of the market (depending on how many actual users share each broadband connection).

There's room for SingTel to grow, and Chee says the company is adding between 7,000 and 10,000 subscribers each month. It's only competitor is the cable provider Starhub.

With 130,000 broadband subscribers, usage peaks at 1.6 Gbps, generally between 7 PM and 1 AM. On average, HTTP traffic is about 600 Mbps (about 40 percent) and P2P traffic is up to 35 percent, with the rest (25 percent) divided between video, FTP, and other protocols and uses.

Chee says he used to be able to manage P2P traffic with rulesets on routers from Juniper Networks. "At the beginning of the year, however, the P2P applications started using dynamic ports, and we saw congestion during peak hours."

Chee says he only needs to throttle P2P during the peak usage hours. During peak hours, P2P traffic is generally throttled to one-fifth normal speed. "We want to maintain 512 Kbps all the way to the desktop."

90 percent of SingTel's broadband customers are residential users. The company needs to be able to forecast usage. Those who play online games tend to log on to South Korea, and those who surf the Web tend to log on to websites in the U.S. "We need to know when to provision more pipes to the U.S. or South Korea," says Chee.

Currently SingTel charges about $35 for 512 Kbps unlimited. The company is considering charging $10 for 500 MB per month (after the 500 MB, the user would get 56 Kbps instead of 512 Kbps). "Some of our users surf once per day, and mostly just check e-mail," explains Chee.

The company might also like to charge more for heavy usage, but it has to maintain its current low price because Starhub offers 1.5 Mbps for about $32 (56 Singapore Dollars).

Chee says Singtel is starting to get letters from record companies and movie studios. At the moment, Singtel is required only to warn its customers, but a new trade deal with the U.S. would lock in the DMCA in both countries, making failure to maintain the DMCA on the law books in both countries a violation of an international trade agreement. If that happens, the DMCA will come to Singapore.

Explains Varma, "most nations use telephony laws to control service providers. AT&T is not liable for what you and I say on the telephone. Broadcast laws, however, are very different. A TV station is liable for the programs it broadcasts. Many nations are starting to view service providers more like broadcasters and less like phone companies."

As that trend grows, service providers will need to buy products like P-Cube's that will enable them to monitor every application that every user is running.

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