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At Sandvine, we’ve long argued that implementing UBB would likely have minimal (if any) impact on network congestion and subscriber quality of experience (QoE) during peak, as subscribers are unlikely to stop using their favorite applications during the peak evening hours. CSPs that are actually seeking to manage network congestion need to put effective traffic management mechanisms in place in order to proactively ensure high subscriber QoE for real-time sensitive applications during peak hours.
With a number of US-based fixed-access CSPs who participate in the Global Internet Phenomena report having implemented UBB over the past 18 months, we decided to compare how subscribers behave on networks that have implemented UBB versus behavior on unlimited usage networks.
The first image below shows a comparison of usage between the two types of networks during peak period. Interestingly, and perhaps unsurprisingly, peak period on both networks that offer UBB and those that do not, is of similar length and occurs between the hours of 7pm and 10pm.
What stands out most clearly is the fact that Real-Time Entertainment’s traffic share is almost identical on both networks, demonstrating that high bandwidth streaming audio and video traffic is of such high value to all subscribers that they are unwilling to stop or alter the way the consume it even though they have a cap placed on their monthly usage. What is also interesting is how much lower a share Filesharing traffic has on networks with UBB compared to those who do not have it. This demonstrates that subscribers may be mindfully limiting their use of Filesharing applications, which often generate traffic in both the upstream and downstream direction. Additionally, aside from being a good peer (which is likely of little importance to occasional Filesharing users), there is little direct benefit to uploading content, so that might well be the first activity that is stopped. It may even be possible that Real-Time Entertainment has a slightly higher share on networks with UBB due in part to the fact subscribers are getting more of their content via Real-Time Entertainments sources which are typically more efficient (if you consider the value proposition to be “equal entertainment for less aggregate usage”) than Filesharing, since there is relatively little upstream traffic associated with streaming. But what about the traffic profile during off peak hours? The figure below shows that when comparing the two types of networks the overall make-up has little difference than peak hours, with the disparity between the share of Filesharing traffic actually increasing slightly. This is to be expected since Filesharing applications typically run continuously throughout the night when other application usage drops off substantially – since people are sleeping.
It should be made clear, that this comparison did not look at the volume of traffic generated by the two types of networks. A direct comparison proved difficult as each CSP offers various levels of speed tiers and usage caps which can greatly impact overall usage. What this comparison does demonstrate however is that subscribers seem to be unwilling to curb their usage of Real-Time Entertainment, and that operators will need to continue to proactively ensure high subscriber QoE for streaming audio and video whether they institute UBB or not.
In the coming weeks, I’ll strive to dig even more untold stories and post them here. That being said, if you want to get a head start on me, feel free to download our 1H 2013 report today.
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