Darknets to eclipse bandwidth management

Found on The Register on Thursday, 01 September 2005
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Encrypted P2P networks will soon make bandwidth management based on deep packet inspection obsolete, says Staselog, a Finnish appliance outfit.

Around 80 per cent of all traffic in the Internet is already P2P. This traffic will increase 1,000-fold in the next five years and most of it will be encrypted P2P, according to a study by Staselog and researchers at Finnish Universities.

Along with next generation file trading networks featuring the use of encryption - so-called darknets - scrambled VoIP traffic will also to the load service provider networks have to support. Staselog's sales pitch is that current approaches to bandwidth management, based on deep packet inspection to detect and throttle P2P, will be unable to cope when most traffic is encrypted - hence the need to introduce different traffic prioritisation techniques.

P2P will continue to improve. The more it's getting challenged, the better it gets. All those who try to fight it have to realize that they cannot win. It's a war against time; and they will lose. That's technical evolution and it works like biological evolution, with one exception: P2P won't have to deal with extinction.