Yup. That’s right, sixty percent (60%). I was informed by a reliable source that almost 60% of the internet bandwidth consumed in the Philippines are coming from peer-to-peer and torrents.
I was aghast when I heard that. I know huge volumes of bandwidth are being used for such services like downloading torrents (e.g. Pirate Bay, Mini Nova, Torrent Spy) and music from P2P services like Kazaa and LimeWire but I did not imagine it could be that huge. And that does not include regular site downloads (not sure if video sharing sites like YouTube are included but I guess not).
Still, the figure simply tells us that a lot of people are downloading tons of media using their broadband connection. To better visualize that number, let’s plug some specific numbers and do a little extrapolation.
In an earlier report, PLDT claimed that they have a total o 422,000 broadband subscribers by the 2nd half of 2007. That includes 210,000 Smart Bro subscribers and about 200,000 PLDT myDSL subscribers. We will exclude the 300,000 dial-up subscriber using PLDT Vibe.
I then pulled out my monthly NetMeter stats which logs my daily/monthly bandwidth usage per workstation. My desktop PC logged an average 25GB of bandwidth a month — it’s a mix of usual surfing, P2P, podcast downloads, YouTube, etc.
For the sake of this computation, let’s say 50% of my monthly usage comes from P2P/Torrents so that putss me at 12.5GB. I think I’m not really that heavy a user in that segment though I download a lot of podcasts and vidcasts.
Now, we multiply that 12.5GB by 422,000 subscribers, that gives us 5,275 Terabytes (or 5.275 Petabytes). Add the numbers of the other telcos/ISPs and the numbers could easily double.
In any case, I believe this is an alarming problem for the telcos and they know that. The next question is — will they be doing something to curb this trend?
If they are planning on capping something. Then let me propose this:
Sell a plan that offers the same fast SPEED across the board, 5 mbps should be enough for everyone IMO.
Then the subscribers can opt to buy how MUCH data they want to download.
For instance, I can buy a 100GB plan for P 1000/month and my friend can buy a 500GB plan for P 5000/month, both of us getting the same 5mbps speed.
This way heavy users will pay an amount that is directly proportional to the data they are going to use. Although this does not apply to mobile broadband due to the physical limitations of the medium but fixed line broadband has no such limitations.
The problem of bandwidth capping is not going away and I believe that this is the best way to address the situation.