Introduction

The goal of this research is to understand and model the current technical and economic forces that shape the residential broadband market and to propose and evaluate approaches that create incentives to improve broadband services.

The problem is that broadband providers currently are struggling to develop business and service models in which they can recover the significant costs that arise as capacity expands and bandwidth hungry applications (such as peer-to-peer) consume network resources but fail to generate additional revenue. Without viable financial models, providers are motivated to suppress the emergence of non-revenue generating applications and are discouraged from investing in upgrading access network facilities that carry general Internet traffic.

All other broadband stakeholders -- including component and equipment makers, providers of content and application services, end-users and entire sectors of the economy such as education, government and health care -- would benefit from a rapid enhancement of residential broadband. However, network owners must make the bulk of the investment in upgrades even though they realize little return on the benefits that accrue to the other stakeholders. This potentially slows, or stops, the otherwise beneficial upgrading of broadband networks.

Broadband providers are thus uniquely positioned to powerfully influence the technological and economic evolution of the global Internet. Yet, the forces that shape this evolution are poorly understood. There is currently very little network research focused on 1) collecting data about broadband access networks or 2) working to ensure that the problems facing broadband network owners are addressed in ways compatible with the architectural values embodied in the Internet's original design. This project seeks to do both.

Approach

Specifically our research includes the following components:

• Systematic, multi-resolution collection of data and network traffic from broadband access networks
• Analysis of access network traffic with a focus on the architectural implications of traffic and technological trends for the interfaces between consumers, broadband providers, and the general Internet.
• Development of a model that captures the complex dependencies between the aggregation behavior of network traffic, broadband provider cost recovery approaches, and the traffic properties that matter to end users and their applications.
• Development of network architectures which support new business models for broadband networks that facilitate cost recovery and encourage investment in upgrading access network facilities that carry general Internet traffic.

The intellectual merit of this work is that it will provide a coherent picture of the technical and economic forces that are shaping residential broadband access. This will inform and help align the technology and economic research in the networking space. Broadband research must be informed by economic and technical realities if it is to be relevant -- both the technical and economic research communities run the risk of developing clever but irrelevant innovations, theories, and models without an appreciation of the trends and constraints shaping broadband. This work will provide a framework, as well as real data and analytic and simulation results, to inform and shape this process.

The broader impact of this work is that all broadband stakeholders would benefit if their interests were aligned to encourage, rather than suppress, innovation in broadband applications, services, and equipment. Major sectors, including health care, education, and government itself, would benefit from continued growth and innovation in broadband. Yet currently these and all stakeholders are captive to the decisions of broadband access providers -- risking developments in broadband access networks that are architecturally undesirable or significantly delayed from the overall perspective. The goal of the research is to contribute to the vitality of all broadband stakeholders and encourage the rapid expansion of broadband capacity, availability and quality in ways that maintain the architectural values of the original Internet.