P2P - From Internet Scourge to Savior

microbrewer writes "The MIT Technology Review has up a feature discussing the future of p2p networks. Specifically, they look at their role in content distribution, in the age of ubiquitous video services. Soon, the article asserts, the very same p2p-style networks that 'threatened' legitimate business may be the basis for most video-on-demand services." From the article: "So how could additional P2P traffic actually be a good thing for the Internet? Carnegie Mellon's Zhang points out that because peer-to-peer networks exploit both the downlink and uplink capacities of users' Internet connections, they distribute content more efficiently than centralized 'unicast' technologies. Zhang also says it should be possible to label P2P traffic so that service providers can track it and decide how much of it to allow through their networks. He and colleagues from the University of California at Berkeley have founded a startup, Rinera, to develop software that will give service providers such control."

Comments

But are the existing channels ready for this

[ztransform]

It is a good theory that moving distribution to many decentralised locations will improve content distribution. But present-day distribution networks and large-bandwidth sites have already bought and installed the infrastructure to send large volumes of bandwidth to Tier-1 ISP distribution points, and so forth to smaller ISPs etc. This works today.

I am agreed that P2P isn't necessarily bad - in fact if P2P algorithms could favour traffic within the same subnet, or indeed allow an ISP to somehow inform the P2P client which nodes are on the same ISP, then an ISP could actually benefit as traffic fills up the internal pipes and less traffic has to be purchased from other ISPs.

To expand on this point, perhaps a multicast protocol like DHCP on the local subject could be implemented; call it the "ISP IP Directory" protocol, or IID, and basically a P2P client would send a multicast query to the IID address with a query ("is x.x.x.x within your network? Or within your preferred peers?") and the IID server would respond with a yes/no. Then P2Ps could optimally download from preferred addresses..!

A shift in thinking in the design of P2P protocols is required if we really want to optimise bandwidth and content distribution.

"scourge"? try "broadband sales driver"...

[plasmacutter]

Seriously.. everyone i knew from close family to the furthest acquaintance didn't think broadband was necessary or worth it until p2p traffic caught on.

yeah... all those people are using that 4-10 megabits a second so cnn.com will load faster.. riiight.

Re:Practicality and reality

[Red Flayer]

But management did not want to do this, because they thought it would fill their bandwidth up with video, which they didn't want.

Yup. Heaven forbid that their customers actually use all the bandwidth they pay for -- if that happened, how could they oversell their capacity?

At the time, traffic shaping and billing technology was not really up to speed, people were still used to how NSFnet did things to some extent. So instead of multicasting, people did p2p, which is less efficient.

The summary (and TFA) mentions that p2p can actually be more efficient than multicast, since it utilizes both the up- and downstream capacities of clients.

Which is precisely why it won't happen - we don't live in some federated decentralized anarchist council structure, we live in an imperialist, capitalist society where capital is centralized in a few hands, along with the media, political power for the most part, and so on.

You're right, of course. But that's tangential, it simply provides the mechanism by which monied interests can make sure they get their way.

The issue I see is that the content distributors and the bandwidth providers can work together to get a lock on high profits for both. We're all familiar with the DMCA. But with the right tools (like what the author has created a company to do) the bandwidth providers can lock out the last competing method of distribution.

The best solution I see is to designate bandwidth providers as common carriers, so that it will be illegal for them to discriminate between packets. Then again, that's government interference, so I'm sure a lot of the libertarians and anarchists here will disagree...