Howdy, Truman. :) Truman Boyes wrote:
I would expect traffic volumes would be no more significant than today's volumes which are already full of p2p. I believe ISPs just don't care that much. As long as they are making some margin, then there is no significant interest (aside from stochastic modeling for fun) in seeing how much tunneled v6 a provider is carrying. They just wouldn't care, unless, as you point out, this is being used to avoid DPI/QoS boxes. The number of ISPs that monitor these types of things in detail would be far and in between. I believe that if we proposed a pop quiz to the top 10 ISPs in NZ and asked them how much GRE or IPIP traffic they carry a day, the answer would generally be "not sure". But I bet the top 10 ISPs would know pretty close to how many Mbps / Gbps they are sending to international.
The problem is (from my experience at ISPs, and generally being in touch with the industry in NZ) is that they *aren't* making a fantastic margin at the moment, and they generally keep a very close eye on their International bandwidth consumption and what protocols are consuming the majority of that traffic. An unexpected change in protocol utilisation that could bypass a QoS/DPI platform and cause either performance degradation/congestion, or cause an ISPs costs to change significantly would be caught reasonably quickly. Many ISPs in NZ already have this capability (including many of the top 10), or have been evaluating it. If they don't have the DPI/QoS capability, they would still have netflow -- if for nothing other than billing -- which would allow them to reasonably quickly determine what the hell is going on in their network. I suspect you are correct in that none could tell you today because it's not a significant traffic flow and thereby just recorded in "other" (or they're just not interested), but if they saw their aggregate traffic pattern changing I'd imagine that people would begin asking questions very quickly. If squashing that v6 tunnel traffic down is going to allow them to control their contention better and allow more, shall we say, fair-use services, through, then that will happen pretty quickly. I think protocol/payload inspection is becoming more common, as people seem to be trying to derive the most revenue possible from their expenses to make a profit, and this is one way that really helps them understand their cost basis and customer models. In the past I've certainly used netflow/protocol statistics to offload customers that just were not profitable and allow us to make a business change to support profitable customers. Outside of NZ (and maybe Australia - although my experience here is looking similar), people maybe don't care anywhere near as much because their transit costs are significantly lower. NZ and certain products sold within NZ also have had restrictions on transport costs that also made DPI important. YMMV? Absolutely. aj.