For years we saw the growth of web traffic being the key focus prior to the rapid turn to P2P as consumers surveyed the Internet for content of interest.  As content appeared the migration to P2P protocols surged and the race to control the usage of upstream bandwidth became a key concern in the telecom and cable environments.  As privacy and copyright owners battled heavily in the P2P space, it is particularly interesting to see how fast these new forms of direct download and streaming delivery are growing in usage.  Just a couple months after hulu (www.hulu.com) launched reports from service providers like AT&T (http://www.dslreports.com/shownews/ATT-Backbone-Sees-20-P2P-Drop-96602) began showing changes in the usage patterns.  In addition, new network management tools like DOCSIS 3.0 are able control upstream usage without digging into privacy waters.

At CloudShield, we understand the importance of helping service providers consider ways to deal with increases in network traffic stemming from multimedia, full-HTML Web browsing, P2P file sharing, streaming videos and Internet video services. The most effective way of handling the traffic from these services is to ensure that smarter, scalable technology is in place. What has become interesting to watch is how fast the market has turned from one of being able identify protocols (such as Skype, BitTorrent and eDonkey) to hunt out hidden offenders to being more concerned about how to help drive customer experience.  As legal and high quality content is being pushed into the Internet, migrating from finding the content owners to being able to be aware of them and focusing on how to actually increase benefits through the use of cache technology, boosting QoS priorities and enabling peering relationships between content owners and the service providers delivering content to end users is a very different world for DPI and controlling services from what was raging just a few years ago.  In addition, service providers are starting to migrate to billing models (think mobile style billing in broadband) and content delivery agents (think IPTV) that seem to actually enable to continued growth for consumers in a viable model.  It feels like the rise of the CDN’s all over again and this time with the aid of an intelligent network ushering traffic through to end users.  The traffic mix is changing rapidly again, and this time the new source of growth doesn’t seem to have a lot of enemies!