Marketing Myth #1 outlined the way third-party P2P traffic steals upload bandwidth from home networks. The more bandwidth you have the bigger the steal. It's one of the Elephants in the room that service providers are ignoring. This article will show how precious bandwidth can be protected from a freeloading technology.

Today people are downloading and sharing video and photos; playing games on line; making voice calls; watching TV; and playing music. However, they may and very often do experience problems when they run these network applications. The different apps have different transport requirements: they share the local loop and delivery on IP networks isn't predictive, it's best effort. These issues have been addressed and robust QoS mechanisms have been developed and implemented, but more is needed.
The key issue is the fact, often overlooked, that service providers cannot manage the quality of the various applications all the way to the end user. Gateways introduce congestion and various service degradations will occur in the local loop, e.g. it might come from upstream traffic, induced by third-party P2P traffic, over which the service provider has no control. New quality mechanisms have therefore been developed in order to cover up or compensate the influence of the various service artifacts on the user experience. The term Quality of Application (QoA) is used to describe these quality algorithms and functions.

Real-time traffic gets the highest priority. VoIP gets precedence, followed by Gaming and Video.  Gaming only involves short commands and unless they are delivered in real time the end user experience is so low that the value of the game is destroyed. P2P traffic gets the lowest priority.

The hardware is a leading-edge processor that employs deterministic multithreaded software. Each thread in the Ubicom platform runs an event loop for processing events. Events are sorted so that latency sensitive events are processed by one set of threads, while events that are less sensitive to latency are processed by another set.

Addressing the P2P issue

StreamEngine analyzes the Internet connection to determine the available bandwidth and then shapes network traffic to avoid creating bottlenecks. The mechanism cannot block third-party P2P downloads, but it can give this freeloading application the lowest priority and thereby minimize its impact.  Moreover StreamEngine can handle over 30,000 P2P connections and still preserve the quality of voice calls.

The Ubicom Web site (http://streamengine.ubicom.com) has flash demos that illustrate how StreamEngine handles Online Gaming, VoIP, Streaming Video and File Sharing.  In addition there is a very informative demo on Understanding Lag.  Check it out.

Marketing Myth #3 will look at the most important quality parameter: QoE. E is the end-user Experience and end users are the people who pay for the services.