P2P threatens flat-rate broadband

On VNUnet, Dinah Greek summarizes an important discussion at last night's ISP Forum in London: "The growing popularity of P2P sites is driving ISP costs to unacceptable levels. Since much P2P traffic does not originate from ISPs' networks it costs them more to deliver it, leading to their consideration of unpopular measures such as port throttling P2P sites, data download limits or pay-as-you-go pricing. But ISPs are still deeply reluctant to change to alternative pricing models because of the unpopularity of such schemes with consumers. 'None is going public with this yet because there is a real risk they could lose customers, but 10 are thinking about introducing application intelligent services rather than using the speed-equals-price business model,' said Chris Colman, Sandvine's EMEA managing director. Currently, only around five per cent of broadband subscribers are deemed heavy users, but they account for 55 per cent of broadband traffic..."