ISPs Hate Zombies

LONDON -- StreamShield Networks, the leader in clean internet pipes, has today announced the results of a survey* that was conducted during the recent LINX (London Internet Exchange) event in London. 100 UK ISPs were invited to respond to a number of questions that investigated which areas of business were causing them the most concern – the key issue being the potential disruption to service that spam zombie machines can cause, according to 96% of respondents.

The other three key business issues which were highlighted by 92% of respondents in the survey included the difficulties ISPs face in differentiating services from competitors, identifying new sources of revenue and dealing with the concerns of subscribers on the security of the service being delivered.

“With Gartner estimating that up to 70% of all spam is generated by zombie infected machines it seems their concerns are justified,” said Geoff Bennett, Director of Product Marketing at StreamShield. “However, ISPs can work to rectify this quickly, simply by deploying new technologies which already exist in the marketplace. The issues of differentiation, finding new revenue sources and re-assuring customers of security can also be addressed through third party offerings. With both home and business consumers taking a more pro-active approach to reviewing service levels from suppliers, as well as considering monthly costs of the subscription, ISPs are unfortunately under more pressure than ever before to improve services if they want to maintain their current revenues, let alone increase them.”

Optimising the bandwidth of a network, customer churn, falling ARPU, and negative impacts on services as a result of unclean content such as spam, adware and malware were also mentioned as areas of concern. The majority of survey respondents also recognised that providing customers with a guaranteed ‘pre-cleaned’ internet service could be a revenue generating opportunity.

StreamShield Networks Ltd.