Too many ISPs are fighting a losing war with their own customers' P2P usage. Here's one solution.

by Alex Goldman ISP-Planet Managing Editor [February 15, 2007]

Petach Tikva, Israel-based Oversi is a caching specialist offering P2P acceleration and storage service devices to ISPs. We catch up with the company during a tour of the U.S., which is a relatively new market for the company (it's bigger in Asia, the Middle East, and South America).

The P2P product is similar to offerings from CacheLogic (which we've written about) and PeerApp (which we've never heard of). These companies offer ISPs the ability to lower the cost of P2P traffic without throttling or blocking it, both of which are unpopular with customers (as you can see from a quick search of BroadbandReports).

Instead, these systems aim to keep P2P traffic within the ISP's own network. We covered the benefits of this in detail four years ago in Building a Better P2P Delivery System, but a few things have changed since then.

Benefits
Ehud Elizur, Oversi vice president of sales for North America says that ISPs in North America benefit differently from OverCache than those elsewhere. In South Korea or Israel, for example, a significant amount of P2P traffic might be expensive international bandwidth, and serving those files locally would significantly cut costs. On the other hand, in North America, international traffic is less of a consideration. "The infrastructure here is underdeveloped, and caching helps ISPs handle congestion," he says.

Dr. Nimrod Kozlovski, Oversi's senior internet specialist, says congestion will only get worse as file sizes increase with the growing popularity of video. "The average video file is 700 MB to 1 GB," he notes.

Eiton Efron, Oversi vice president of marketing and business development, adds that the cache can be used as a content delivery network, allowing ISPs to cash in on content monetization or, alternatively, allowing ISPs to promote user-generated content. "Producers of user-generated content cannot afford Akamai," he notes.

Kozlovski says that as soon as P2P is no longer an enemy of the network, ISPs realize additional benefits. Users become more satisfied with the ISP once P2P service is reliable. In addition, users can utilize other services, such as VoIP, increasing customer satisfaction. Since these additional services can generate additional revenue, the overall bottom line can improve significantly.

How it works
Each system has a slightly different method for achieving its goal. Kozlovski, says he does not want to focus on disparaging the competition but prefers to tout Oversi's strengths.

Oversi's OverCache acts as a peer on the P2P network, offering the ISP's users local access to in-demand files. Today, many networks demand reciprocity: for each bit you download, you must upload a bit. This makes traffic from, say Bit Torrent, symmetrical, and many residential networks are asymmetrical, with more download than upload capacity.

Whereas a traditional P2P client would Overload the uplink (and restrict downloading to the speed of the uplink) Oversi's cache gets around this bottleneck because it does not demand reciprocity. Kozlovski says that the OverCache will serve up to 90 percent of a file (and more under ideal conditions). If, for whatever reason, the P2P network is performing well, or if every user on a network is using P2P, the OverCache is capable of serving a smaller percentage of the file and allowing the P2P network to handle the rest of the load.

In addition, OverCache generates a hash for each file it stores. If a subsequent file matches a previously generated hash, it is not stored. Thus, the system avoid storing duplicate files. Since a hash is used, the ISP does not need to inspect the content, which would take time and might expose the ISP to legal liability.

This feature makes the company's other product, OverDrive, for online storage, more efficient than the competition, Kozlovski says. If your user shares a photo with several friends on your network, only one copy of that photo will be stored.

Efron adds that many people use online storage to backup their music files. However many people store the same file, OverDrive will require only one copy, saving space on the system.

Working with ISPs
"Many people are indifferent to the costs imposed by P2P networks on ISPs," says Kozlovski. "We know that for this ecosystem to thrive, it needs the ISP. We are ISP-centric. Currently, ISPs have a strong incentive to block or throttle P2P traffic.

In the future, Kozlovski says, an ISP will see P2P service in terms of revenue, not cost cutting. He's been making a whirlwind tour, speaking at the (first annual) P2P Summit, the Media Summit, and to potential customers in the U.S., where the company wants to grow its presence.

ISP-Planet maintains that medium-sized ISPs should seek out companies like Oversi that have proven successful abroad but are trying to break into the U.S. market. Often, these companies are, for a time, willing to work with smaller customers, and offer a reliable product.

Pricing and availability
The product is priced based on bandwidth and number of users. ISPs should have at least several tens of thousands of customers in order to populate the usage database that drives the caching engine.

Pricing can be based on other metrics, and can involve a revenue share if the ISP prefers.

The company is working on a smaller product to be announced later this year. The MediaDrive will be appropriate for smaller ISP customers.

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