Residential Usage Patterns of FTTH subscribers in Japan
Studies of the bandwidth consumption of Japanese broadband subscribers indicates that useage follows bandwidth availability and at any moment the 10% "heavy" users shift among the overall population.
Abstract
As peer-to-peer applications become popular, an unprecedented increase in user-to-user traffic has been observed worldwide, particularly in Japan due to its high penetration rate of broadband access. In this paper, we first report aggregated traffic measurements collected over 15 months from seven ISPs covering 41% of the Japanese backbone traffic. The backbone is dominated by symmetric residential traffic which increased 45% in 2005. We further investigate residential per-customer traffic in one of the ISPs by comparing DSL and fiber users, heavy-hitters and normal users, and geographic traffic matrices. The results reveal that a small segment of users dictate the overall behavior; 4% of heavy-hitters account for 75% of the inbound volume. The fiber users account for 86% of the inbound volume, and 62% of the total volume is user-to-user traffic. The dominant applications have poor locality and communicate with a wide range and number of peers. The distribution of heavy-hitters follows power law without a clear boundary between heavy-hitters and normal users, which suggests that ordinary users start playing with peer-to-peer applications, become heavy-hitters, and eventually shift from DSL to fiber. We provide conclusive empirical evidence from a large and diverse set of commercial backbone data that the emergence of a new attractive application has drastically affected traffic usage and capacity engineering requirements.