Drew Calcott wrote:
Maybe I've missed something here, but does implementing traffic shaping on content that is sitting in a local cache seem a little bit silly...? And is it really fair to count data that is merely being pushed from inside their own network towards people's (rather insignificant) usage caps?
As other people have mentioned, shaping towards the subscriber access loop may be required to avoid congestion in the access network. Shared spectrum networks in particular have this requirement especially for the upstream direction (i.e. DOCSIS style). On the transit-ingress side of the equation, the cache appliance provides a nice easy place to provide aggregate contention - and if it has logic in it that can do it itself based on some rules (time-of-day, number of subscribers, content type, whatever) then it makes it a really good place to ensure that the cache itself isn't congesting your upstream transit. aj