ipoque GmbH

Peer to Peer

Expensive P2P: File sharing based on Peer-to-Peer (P2P) networks has surpassed the World Wide Web as the single most bandwidth-consuming application in many parts of today's Internet. It can cause a substantial increase in traffic volume which in turn incurs rising communication costs and adversely affects the performance of other network applications such as Web, E-Mail and File Transfer. Legacy filtering approaches based on port numbers are error prone. They produce many mismatches (about 30-50%) and are easily circumvented.

Solution: The PRX P2P filter feature a protocol-based identification of P2P traffic. Once such traffic has been identified, it can be blocked or throttled to a defined rate. Additionally, all P2P traffic is assigned a lower priority than other traffic ensuring an improved network performance during periods of high utilization. The rate limitation is invisible to P2P users. File sharing applications continue to work, only with a lower data rate. This approach minimizes the motivation of users to try to circumvent the P2P filter device.

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