A lot students transpire the responsibility to professional writers because they lack the talent to write a good paper about Peer-to-Peer Filters so that the argument why you need to use plagiarism checker, but such guys like composer don't do that. Thanks a lot for the article

Hi Bill,

As mentioned in a personal message before, we would be happy to test your product in a second round of the test. All carrier-grade filtering solutions are invited to participate.

For the first round, we invited all vendors active in the P2P filtering market back in Q1/2007.

Broadband access "flat rates" would need to be much more expensive if they would cater for P2P usage for everybody. The consumer flat rate is offered assuming that the consumers do not download stuff at max speed 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.  Such real flat rates are offered for businesses at much higher prices...  Unfortunately the P2P residential users are not willing to pay hundreds of dollars per month like a business.

Therefore ISPs have to use a hybrid cost model where the occasional users contribute to the cost of network bandwidth supplied for the P2P users.  Without disclosing any individual statistics, typically less than 1% of the broadband access users generate more than 60% of the network bandwidth.

The most expensive network cost are the external uplinks (Internet commercial exchange [CIX] peers).  Quite a few major P2P seeds are located in remote locations - P2P traffic is usually worldwide distributed. Filtering does not actually save bandwidth, it helps to reduce the speed at which P2P bandwidth demand is growing, specifically on the uplinks. This is why ISPs are interested in this technology.

Best regards, Carsten

"Such apps often use entire multi-megabit DSL bandwidth, continuously, whereas most ISPs design their networks on the assumption that an average user will need as little as 100 kbit/s."

While I agree that the industry protect their copyrighted material, and also enterprises should be able to filter the bandwidth used by their employees (a employee should not be downloading mp3 or movies during work, right?), I question the motivation of ISPs.

If I pay for, let's say, a 3MB connection, am I supposed to just browse and e-mail? Why can't I plug into every bit of my multimegabit connection? Or if ISPs can reduce costs by filtering and improving the reliability of theirs networks, will these gains be shared with its users by lowering connection prices? I bet no. It will only improve their profit margin. Sell 3MB, expect each user don't surpass 10% of it and you can have a lot more paying users than your nominal capacity would permit.

"Nothing promotes the development of technologies more than a desire for free stuff"

Deep thought! Totally agree. :)

Well you can't say it's a shame for the researchers on the basis of the vendors they selected for the trial test. I believe their selection was based on P2P filters that are making all the hype in the markets. You've admitted that yours is a new technology and probably might not make the break yet in the media.

But it's great to hear that your product is really working at least according to your evaluation and the fact that you can offer it for testing shows your confidence in it delivering value for money. Let's hear from the authors of the report on how your products works and then may be you can see a real change in fortune for SafeMedia.

It's a real shame that they only looked at major vendors and not new technology companies.

SafeMedia developed a technology solution that detects and blocks over (650) P2P clients including those that use encryption and port hop to avoid detection.  

Our network security appliance was fully tested by a major US based ISP and they confirmed it blocks everything.  The size of the testing suite used for this report was not large by our standards.  We can handle 40GB backbones and maintain a low latency of .4Ms.  

What's different in our technology is we don't use DPI and look at layer 7 (content). 

We'll ship SNEP a unit tonight if they want to see real results.

that's really interesting news,not sure that it's good.

 where will I download my music:))))

But even if this  works among US ISP I doubt that will work in the world.Or people will invent something new that let them  get free stuff.Nothing promotes the development of technologies more than a desire for free stuff:))))

Many thanks for this wonderful report. As a research student i know very well how difficult it can be to simulate actual operational conditions in laboratory experiments. As i perused through your report partly due to the exigencies of time, i was really impressed at how detailed and honestly you went about conducting this reasearch. It's a big shame to the other vendors who pull out. I think it was an excellent window of opportunity for them to have honestly evaluate the performance of their product and possibly get feedbacks that would have helped them to improve upon their products. May be they are very aware of the limitations of their products.

My question though is are these filters technologically feasible? With Congress and other legislative bodies increasingly calling on ISPs to instal these filters in their infrastructure, some P2P companies have come under intense criticism for the failure of their devices to perform as expected. In defence, they are simply saying that people are expecting them to do the impossible:

P2P companies say they can't filter

Although the signs are good for the two products that made through your tests, do you see in the forseeable future better filters coming to the markets or the challenges to produce better filters is so great that it will thwart any  futurte breakthrough in this area?