ISP uplink pricing in a competitive market

Abstract

In recent years, the upgrade of access networks to broadband networks together with the P2P technology has brought many new applications to the Internet. P2P applications have quickly become the biggest consumer of network resources. ISPs of access networks as well as backbone networks are all wondering how to better manage their network resources. We explore the idea of uplink pricing as a way to provide differential pricing to P2P and regular users. In particular, we formulate a simple economic model to analyze under what scenarios uplink pricing will be adopted by all ISPs in a competitive market.