FTTH: Marketing Myth #1

Different media types have different requirements: VoIP is a real-time medium and latency must be low, but it can accommodate lost packets. Latency is not relevant for data services like email and IM but missing packets have to be resent otherwise the result is garbage. And then there's IPTV, which needs a lot of bandwidth: around 6M if it's high-definition TV. Obvious conclusions: you need a lot of bandwidth in order to transport multimedia traffic to the home and if the price is right, then Fiber To The Home (FTTH) is the optimum medium.
I used to think that the different needs of the different media types could be handled by partitioning the bandwidth: that was the pitch I got from vendors and service providers, but it's a myth. If you're getting all the services from the same service provider, i.e. a triple or quad play bundle, then the services can be partitioned and they won't interfere with each other. But there's a greedy, third party Elephant in this scenario: Peer-to-Peer (P2P) file sharing.
Most of the traffic on the Internet comes from P2P file sharing and it's one of the most demanding applications for the home network. P2P can interfere with VoIP calls and online games; it slows down Web browsing, and can crash networking equipment. P2P traffic can be given its own partition, but the issue that the service providers are ignoring - the Elephant in the multimedia living room - is the way other peoples' downloads will steal upload bandwidth from your fiber connection.

At first sight it's difficult to see how that can happen, so let's spell it out. Your son or daughter has used a popular P2P application to download a movie. It isn't legal but it happens. The application informs its P2P clients around the world that you have this movie and that you are using, for example, a 100 MB connection. This function is an integral part of the application. Clients in your area who want the same movie will then be able to use your connection to get it, as long as the relevant PC is on line. Therefore there will be a significant, negative impact on the other applications you're running at the time.
End users will experience a poor quality service for the duration of the download and might start to query the wisdom of signing up to a high-speed service. They might go further and complain to the service provider who has made a significant investment in FTTH. Even worse is the fact that there is nothing that can be done about these complaints because the download services were probably working perfectly at the time.

Marketing Myth #2 will show how precious uplink bandwidth can be protected from this freeloading technology and then I'll introduce you to a second Elephant.
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