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Sober IT truths from the island-state

by Michael Tan, Singapore

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Elimination of P2P will eliminate residential broadband sales

Nov 29, 2007 10:13

We can get real now. Because there's a study done by German boffins on what goes on in the Internet. And what they find confirms my long-held suspicions. When you build a super data highway, you gotta have traffic. And traffic will happen if you have sufficient attractions on the highway. Somewhere to go, something to do. Without that, you can just make do with a few B-roads.

Eighty-four percent of Internet traffic in Europe is P2P traffic. At night, 95 percent of the traffic is P2P. And there's no reason English-speaking sophisticated Singapore should be any less than that. Most of the stuff in that P2P traffic are movies, music and porn.

What all this means is that the Internet right now is mainly a user-financed distribution network for content distribution. If the content owners play it right, this in itself is cost savings which they can exploit to their advantage. Of course, most of the staff of the content companies would have to be fired if they admitted and exploited this user distribution network, since most of the jobs in content publishers' companies depend on the challenge of distribution which, given the Internet, becomes much less of a challenge.

Less sales staff, less channel sales managers, less marketing staff... wow, the content makers can probably fire the publishers without much loss of
revenue, perhaps even make a bigger profit.

Doubtless, most of that is probably illegal. Hence, when the content owners wanna shut this P2P down, they have the right to do so. The bottom line from the ISP side is that if P2P file-swapping were to be made so difficult, if the ISPs continue to shape traffic, if we were to erase P2P from the planet and act like this technology was never invented, the ISPs will just not be able to sell fat pipes without cheating customers.

And if they can't sell fat pipes, all their infrastructure now would not be amortized.

Yet some idiot ISPs keep complaining that P2P is screwing up their traffic--which is basically biting the hand which feeds it. I've never heard Singapore ISPs complain publicly before. What Singapore did was to add more and more and more bandwidth, to a level so incredible today that "gigabits" probably won't describe the number by three orders of magnitude.

So what to do?

Simple. Change the laws a little bit. Or push the content publishers a little--you gotta push them because their directors won't just eliminate their own jobs without a little push. You gotta push the Bosses and Owners of content publishers to fire some redundant guys. Make a structure where it is legal to swap content and let the content makers or publishers still make money, perhaps more money than they ever dreamed of.

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About Michael Tan

Michael Tan is lucky enough not to have to choose between his job and his passion. He is the responsible for all aspects of developing new businesses and sourcing new productlines for a regional IT distribution company. He also oversees the company's legal affairs as General Counsel. In real life, he is a technology enthusiast, from both the fun and business viewpoint. The only choices he has to make are whether to play with his astro telescopes, his PC games, his Wii console, hit the track, tweak his car, or refine his biofilters, post his blogs, research for a new digicam, scour every forum to feed his habit further, play with his son… You can reach Michael at michaeltanyk@gmail.com ALL BLOGPOSTS ONLY REFLECT MICHAEL'S OPINIONS AND NOBODY ELSES'.