Is more P2P always bad for ISPs? An analysis of P2P and ISP business models

Internet Service Providers (ISPs) face increasing bandwidth pressure from rising access demand by users, especially P2P and VoD applications. Traditionally, P2P has been viewed as tremendously negative from the perspective of the ISP. In this paper, we question this assumption and study the impact of P2P applications on the effective ISP functionality. We perform an economic analysis to show that a higher P2P penetration rate does not necessarily lead to increased ISP bottleneck link bandwidth pressure. Our results show that the local serving rate is critical for the sustainability of the ISP business model as well as for the benefit of P2P users.