This carrier class box based on Dell and EMC hardware promises to save ISPs money and could also change the economics of the internet.

by Alex Goldman ISP-Planet Managing Editor [July 9, 2007]

Newton Upper Falls, Mass.-based P2P enabler PeerApp was founded in 2004 (with R&D in Herzliya, Israel), making it a later entry to the game, after CacheLogic and Oversi.

Ashwin Moranganti, PeerApp vice president of marketing acknowledges that CacheLogic did this first but says PeerApp is doing it better. These days, that's how it works. The pioneers build an industry and prove it's possible and later entrants segment the customer base and pick the cream of the crop.

PeerApp is aiming for the largest ISP customers.

"We took a different approach than CacheLogic," says Moranganti. "We built a carrier grade infrastructure."

The company took care to utilize equipment that the large ISPs might already have. "We incorporate existing bandwidth shaping equipment from Sandvine or Allot and so on, and use that as the redirector. We made these decisions in order to be scalable and adaptable. We chose off the shelf carrier grade equipment: a Dell blade server with EMC servers. It can scale indefinitely. You can add servers for redirection or storage or add CPU power to increase deep packet inspection."

He says that the company currently has five paying ISP customers and is in trials with many others. The company started in South America and Asia because bandwidth costs are higher there, and is now moving into the U.S.

"There are different problems in the U.S.," says Moranganti (see image at right). "Cable internet providers face upstream congestion. They don't want to admit it in public because they're competing with DSL, but the upstream is their Achilles heel. We can sit in the headend or higher up the chain and if a Verizon subscriber tries to download from a Cox subscriber, the Cox upload goes from our cache instead of from the end user's PC."

One side effect is that uploads, when they run off the cache instead of off the end user's PC, can be much faster than would normally be possible. Some P2P networks, such as BitTorrent, enforce reciprocity: for each bit uploaded, you can download one bit. But most users have asymmetric connections, with a much higher download speed than upload speed. This limits the extent to which they can use networks like BitTorrent. PeerApp's infrastructure will allow users to get the most out of such networks.

Differences
Moranganti says PeerApp is very different from CacheLogic and Oversi.

"CacheLogic are the pioneers. They brought a product to market. They validated that you can cache P2P traffic," Moranganti says. "But their product is not carrier grade. It's PC-based stuff. The redirector is in line to the caching engine."

"Oversi do things differently," says Moranganti. "They act as a server, a super peer. They intercept search requests and say, 'download it from me.' It's a good solution and is quite simple, but our customers are worried about the DMCA. They're worried about being in violation of copyright. We make the connection when two customers have decided to share a file. The ISPs are legally protected because we act transparently and are content unaware."

For legal reasons, PeerApp has set up the system so that the end user's PC remains connected to the network but the upload goes off the cache. If the end user disconnects, the cache stops. Moranganti claims that this means that, for legal purposes, the end user controls file sharing, not the ISP. It is transparent and anonymous.

PeerApp's Ultraband appliances are deployed without any stored content. They cache any file that is uploaded or downloaded by a subscriber. As the cache is populated, content comes from the cache to users outside the ISP and comes from the cache to the ISP's users. Downloads by the ISP subscribers from the cache reduce bandwidth costs. Downloads by other ISPs' subscribers from the cache reduce the load on the last mile upstream.

Helping ISPs sell services
In the future, PeerApp plans to provide the tools to allow service providers to control and earn money from content on their networks. "Today's methodology for content providers is the content delivery network (CDN)," says Moranganti. "But this caching infrastructure was not geared to support high quality videos." (It was built to support Usenet.)

"A single Bit Torrent download results in many connections and offers a faster download, but in reality there is an issue with P2P: it's unreliable. It's near zero cost for content providers but peers go up and down and speeds are limited because some ISPs are shaping traffic. The subscriber experience is not necessarily great."

On the other hand, companies are starting to make money with P2P. "Commercial P2P providers are emerging," says Moranganti. "Providers like Joost and Bit Torrent have made deals and are selling content like CinemaNow and Movielink but the download comes off the P2P network. The cost of delivery is lower, so profits are higher, and the content is protected by DRM."

PeerApp is interested in working with commercial P2P providers.

"If commercial P2P providers pay a little to the ISPs and their customers get a better experience, then people will move to their networks. With better speeds and lower costs, content owners will be able to transmit high definition videos. It's a win win situation, a win for all."

PeerApp is preparing for this future. "We are building a P2P services framework. Application providers will be able to plug into it seamlessly. The ISP charges application providers based on the bandwidth used for delivery."

Pricing and availability
For now, however, the company is selling its products to lower bandwidth costs and remove congestion in the last mile. The price of the software is based on anticipated bandwidth savings. Since bandwidth prices vary, that means the price of the software varies. Moranganti says the company will charge less in the U.S., where bandwidth prices are low, than in Columbia, where bandwidth can cost $250 to $300 per megabit.

The hardware comes in two versions. The UltraBand 1000 is a low load single Dell server with JBOD storage. It is priced at $15,000.

The UltraBand 2000 is the carrier grade blade server product, and pricing varies widely depending on the configuration, but a typical configuration of this Dell server with EMC blades would cost $75,000.

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