S-O-B Shades of Blue

Peer to Clear

Peer to Peer, halting infringements

In Belgium a court case between Scarlet Belgium (former Tiscali Belgium) and SABAM was ruled in favor of SABAM. Scarlet was convicted to halt copyright infringed P2P-stream.

S-O-B was involved in the analysis of possible solutions, preparing defense cases and analyzing the proportionality. In first instance the court guided to a possible solution.  During the Proof of Concept it was noticed that the solution was not fit for an operator’s environment. This despite a track record at social network site s and university campuses.

After this failed PoC a field test was performed using traffic shaping. The aim was analyzing the usage of P2P and determine the effects of throttling. We noticed that 6% of the customers was responsible for 50% of the traffic, and that in average 80% of the total traffic was P2P. Throttling resulted in a drop of bandwidth usage. But after two day the traffic showed an increase again. Customers were able to bypass due to encryption and alternative protocols.

The results were reported to the court. The court waived the fines, but ruled that Scarlet still had to search for a solution. This ended in a second RFP in December 2008. From this  RFI two possible candidates came forward. One with the obvious DPI approach, the second with an approach based on getting involved in the social networks. They showed cases with results, amongst them a large international sports event in 2008.

The concept however resulted in a co-operation: PEER TO CLEAR