EE: The Cost of Managing P2P

My friend Jonathon Gordon, Directing Analyst - Telecoms, Expert Market Insight shared his impressions from the Broadband Traffic Management event, held last week at Barcelona.

An interesting observation comes from the presentation of Shan Eisenberg [pictured], Head of Home Propositions and Pricing, EE [UK], While many think that P2P file sharing traffic is no longer a major traffic management issue (due to the portion of video streaming services), it seems that for ISPs this is still a current issue (concerning 4% of the customers, in the following case):

"EE spends around £5M a year on DPI for Peer-to-Peer control within their network [see EE's policies here]. He claimed the alternative is to charge P2P users an addition £15 a month to cover the cost of their network usage. Seems EE is one of the few operators that is not shy to admit they are using DPI (Deep Packet Inspection) to prioritize or limit traffic. EE assert that this results in 770,000 happy broadband customers and 35,000 “constrained customers”. Mr Eisenberg added that they also use DPI to prioritize VoIP and gaming traffic during network congestion, so not all evil after all".

See more - "Great second day at the Telco Big Data and Broadband Traffic Management conference today" - here