Ellacoya's Data

The company's announcing a new traffic management box, and that's the big news, but the company also shared some insights from its cache of real usage data from millions of internet users.

by Alex Goldman ISP-Planet Managing Editor [January 26, 2007]

Ellacoya, the traffic management company, has anonymized data on internet use that reveals some surprising trends. Here's a few conclusions that the company shared with us.

1) Bandwidth hogs exist
Sure, if you're an ISP, you already know this, but if there's any doubt in your company as to whether hogs exist, here's Ellacoya's data. The company says that in the user profiles they have, 5 percent of users (the hogs) generate 45.3 percent of traffic, whereas at the other end of the usage bell curve, those the company calls "barely users" represent a full 40 percent of users but generate only 3.8 percent of traffic.

Fred Sammartino, Ellacoya vice president of marketing and product management, said that ISPs should aim products at all users, not just the bandwidth hogs.

2) VoIP usage is growing
VoIP is one service that is increasingly adopted by all users. In the latter half of 2006, Ellacoya found that usage spiked among the "barely users" from 1.0 percent to 5.5 percent. The hogs, however, had already adopted the technology, and usage rose from 41.7 percent to 41.9 percent.

3) VoIP quality remains poor
You might think that every bandwidth hog would be a VoIP user. Sammartino said that most VoIP services deliver unacceptable call quality as measured in terms of latency, delay, and packet loss.

Of all services, Skype was by far the most popular, but after December, Skype ended its free SkypeOut promotion, so other paid services may have gained ground this year.

The problem, Sammartino said, is that many services continue to deliver unacceptable service most of the time.

Thus, while only 41.9 percent of hogs used VoIP by the end of the year, a full 95 percent were using online gaming services.

4) Gaming is now mainstream
Ellacoya's data on the adoption of gaming suggests such a sharp rise in usage that we would like to see an independent confirmation of the data before we are willing to accept its conclusion.

Adoption in all groups rose (Ellacoya segments users into five groups according to level of bandwidth usage). Even the "barely users" embraced gaming, from 22.3 percent in August to 66 percent in December. In the other five groups, usage ranged from 81 percent to 95 percent.

5) ISPs can have detailed data on internet usage
All of this is just a piece of what Ellacoya knows. ISPs can obtain similar portraits of their user base by using deep packet inspection.

But ISPs will need to be on secure legal ground. If you collect this data, consult your lawyer, check that your AUP allows you to collect it, and make sure that local, national, and (if applicable) other nations' laws are not violated.

The rewards of having this data are great. The larger ISPs are cracking down on bandwidth hogs for example (see coverage in Broadband Reports under the keyword "caps"). Unlike the monopolies, you should have explicit bandwidth caps in place. You should communicate better with your customers than they do. Do so, and customers will be willing to pay a premium—see Speakeasy's ratings at BroadbandReports. Speakeasy specialized early on in providing quality internet service to gamers. That appears to have paid off.

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