Jul 23, 2009 9:15 AM, By Kevin Fitchard

DPI technologist Allot finds its customers networks are starting to experience as surge in multimedia streaming, while P2P’s growth is slowing

Crunching data Allot has collected from operators using its deep packet inspection technology, Allot found that streaming video and audio is now equal to or greater than P2P mobile traffic in all regions of the world and definitely growing at a faster clip. In the second quarter, P2P traffic globally grew 10% while, streaming traffic grew a whopping 60% in just 3 months. That’s not necessarily bad news for operators, though, said Jonathon Gordon, direct of marketing for Allot.

Unlike P2P usage, which is disproportionately in the hands of just a few users, streaming traffic is more evenly distributed among mobile users. Allot found that in the most congested cells, the majority of P2P traffic was concentrated on just one or two users in the cell, usually the top one or two users. In fact, P2P usage is so unevenly distributed that it was the presence of P2P applications that often caused a cell to become congested. The top 5% of cells by bandwidth utilization saw P2P account for 42% of all traffic, while the average cell saw only half of that.

“It’s a small amount of subscribers that are generating a large amount of traffic,” Gordon said, yet they’re often paying the same subscription fees as customers using a fraction of their bandwidth. In general, these tend to be customers that are using 3G data cards the same way they would use a DSL or cable connection. “In areas where we see congestion, it looks very similar to a fixed network,” Gordon said. “It seems many customers are using wireless broadband as a straight swap for fixed broadband.”

Meanwhile, even on congested cells, HTTP streaming was far more evenly distributed among data users and accounted for far less of each individual subscriber’s total data use. Though Gordon cautioned the data is limited—it was gathered from networks serving only 150 million users around the world—and was collected only over a single quarter, it points to the rapid rise of smartphones in the market, many of which support streaming capabilities. In the Americas region, streaming accounted for 23% of all mobile data traffic, second only to Web browsing at 35%, which both can be explained by the relatively higher penetration of smartphones.

Because streaming is more distributed among operator’s customer base, the costs are distributed among millions of subscriptions, rather than a handful. But Gordon said operators shouldn’t become complacent. The alarming pace at which streaming is growing could have a significant impact on operators networks quickly, Gordon said.

“To be honest, I would be much more worried about streaming than peer-to-peer,” Gordon said. “It has a much larger potential impact. Peer-to-peer users are only 5% to 10% of subscribers, but video could be used by 90% to 100%.” As more subscribers start streaming and their average daily consumption of streamed content increases, it could easily become a much bigger source of congestion than P2P. Operators can keep ahead of it through network upgrades and expansion, but they should also look at ways of monetizing streaming as premium service, Gordon said.

Gordon also pointed out that while the P2P wave appears to be subsiding its being replaced with HTTP downloading, which produces the same congestion problems on the network. Rather download large files from another user on P2P network, customers seem to be downloading directly from the Web. HTTP Downloading was the second highest growth application in the second quarter behind streaming. In the Americas they accounted for 16% of application traffic, and in Europe it has already surpassed P2P.

http://telephonyonline.com/mobile-apps/news/streaming-mobile-bandwidth-usage-0723/