Recently, Bian Xiaoyuan saw a message on the Blue Dot network: "Zhejiang Unicom has also begun to strictly investigate high-traffic behaviors such as PCDN and PT, and if it is detected, it may block broadband."
Previously, China Unicom has been in Sichuan and Shanghai and other provinces and cities to strictly investigate home broadband (some enterprise broadband has also been investigated) using PCDN or PT, when the user's broadband account has a large amount of uploaded data, China Unicom may notify the ban of the user's account, after the user contacts China Unicom, the customer service needs to arrange a broadband master to come to the door to "collect evidence". Now this wind has also blown to Zhejiang Province, and Zhejiang Unicom has also begun to verify the "abnormally large traffic broadband problem", and the verification principle is that all should be investigated, stopped, and dismantled.
What conditions will be marked as abnormal by Unicom:
According to China Unicom, a large amount of data is uploaded caused by PCDN and PT (as well as NATS and various plug-in clouds) are considered abnormal.
Other behaviors may also be flagged as anomalous: home NAS, monitoring, e-commerce live streaming, hotel services, etc.
Which ones won't be banned:
According to China Unicom's instructions, the large traffic generated by household NAS, ** monitoring, e-commerce live broadcast, hotel ** services, etc. is a reasonable and legal use scenario, so this part of the account will not be banned.
From this point of view, China Unicom believes that PCDN and PT are unreasonable use scenarios, so they must be banned, and broadband masters must be arranged to take photos and collect evidence.
So why are operators banning PCDN? Because PCDN has been picking up the wool of operators!
PCDN, in short, is an innovative service that combines P2P (Peer-to-Peer Network) and CDN (Content Delivery Network). It cleverly utilizes a large number of unused resources in the telecom edge network to provide more efficient and smooth content transmission for popular services such as on-demand, live broadcast, and so on.
Imagine that CDN is like storing products in a convenience store close to customers, so that customers can buy quickly. P2P, on the other hand, allows every customer to become a "small shop owner" and share their products with others. PCDN combines the advantages of both worlds, ensuring fast content transmission and reducing costs.
In the traditional CDN market, service providers need to lease a large number of server nodes and purchase expensive backbone bandwidth resources to ensure user experience. However, this business model is extremely competitive, the profits are meager, and the money is used to buy basic resources, and worse, with the addition of cloud vendors, the market war is intensifying, which further compresses the living space.
In order to break the dilemma faced by traditional CDNs, PCDN emerged as an innovative solution. It cleverly leverages a large amount of idle resources in the network, transforming each user's device into a miniature content distribution node. This not only significantly reduces the load on professional servers, but also greatly improves the efficiency and speed of content transfer.
The core advantage of PCDN is that it introduces terminal computing resources, successfully builds a terminal computing power network, and realizes a point-to-point content transmission mode. This model greatly reduces the construction cost of CDN, including expensive equipment procurement, bandwidth costs, and high electricity bills. For Internet enterprises, PCDN technology not only attracts a lot of attention with its cost-effective solutions, but also shows significant advantages in the transmission speed of terminal edge networks. Because of this, many first-class giants, such as iXyi, X, Tengx** and Baix, etc., have set foot in the PCDN business in order to maintain a leading position in the fierce market competition.
Although PCDN is not technically complex to implement, building a stable and sustainable business model is challenging.
The rise of PCDN technology has obviously touched the interests of operators, and in this multi-party game, operators, traditional CDN vendors and individual users have become the main players whose interests have been significantly damaged.
First, PCDN poses a challenge to traditional CDN service providers. While traditional CDN services rely on a large number of server nodes and professional network equipment to distribute content, PCDN achieves similar or even better content transmission at a lower cost by utilizing the idle resources of user terminal equipment. This has undoubtedly been an impact on the traditional CDN market, which may lead to a decrease in its market share and revenue.
Second, operators are also feeling the pinch in the rise of PCDN. As the traffic growth of PCDN places an additional burden on the operator's network, especially at the edge of the network, this leads to increased maintenance costs for the access network and the backbone. At the same time, the high usage of PCDN services may also adversely affect the network experience of other users in the cell. In addition, since PCDN services often bypass the traditional CDN services of telecom operators, this may also lead to a decrease in the revenue of operators in this segment.
More importantly, PCDN's business model may violate the service agreement between the operator and the user. While many home broadband service agreements explicitly prohibit the use of home broadband for commercial purposes, PCDN is precisely the use of personal broadband services to profit from the P2P distribution of idle traffic to users. Not only can this behavior be a violation of the service agreement, but it can also put the operator at risk of legal trouble.
PS: In the business field of PCDN, there is a phenomenon: individual users occasionally participate in it, which usually does not have much impact, but those users who have so-called "relationships" can pull in dozens or even hundreds of lines at a time for large-scale operations. However, in order to avoid directly referring to these related users, some people have cleverly shifted the focus of the topic, claiming that individual users' participation in PCDN will have a negative impact on the network, thus transferring the conflict to individual users and making them the target of blame. This practice both obscures the real problem and ignores the legitimacy of individual users under normal usage.
Operators' pricing strategies for broadband services are to adopt different models for individual users and enterprise users. For our ordinary individual users, what they usually enjoy is a service with fast speed and relatively slow upload speed, but ** is more affordable. And enterprise users, because they need a more stable and faster network connection, their service is as fast as the upload speed, but it is also relatively higher.
But the advent of PCDN may upset this balance. Because PCDN uses our equipment to transmit data, this means that some of the data transmission tasks that were originally undertaken by the operator are now transferred to the devices of our ordinary users. As a result, the carrier's network load may be reduced, but their revenue may also be reduced. To compensate for this loss of revenue, operators may consider increasing broadband services**. That is, due to the use of PCDN technology, we may have to pay higher broadband fees in the future.
In Bian's view, PCDN is not a completely negative technology or service. It improves the efficiency and cost-effectiveness of content delivery by making efficient use of idle resources in the network, which is beneficial for the entire Internet ecosystem. The key lies in how to balance the interests of all parties to ensure that the healthy development of PCDN will not harm the legitimate rights and interests of other industry chain participants.