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

Legal Use of technology

[ZahnRosen]

Powerful technologies can be used for powerful things. Blizzard hired the bittorrent developer to help it distribute patches for World of Warcraft. P2P isn't illegal, using it for stealing is... P2P doesn't steal files, users do.

ISP Bandwidth

[b0s0z0ku]

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.

Cap bandwidth or GB of transfer per day. Don't tell me what I have the "right" to use this data capacity for. I know Zhang is only suggesting that it's possible, not necessarily a good idea, but don't give the ISPs any stupid ideas.

-b.

Re:ISP Bandwidth

[rudeboy1]

I agree, this will only make it easier to let ISPs continue this rediculous crusade of charging more to make more bandwidth available, but limiting our ability to use it. This is the sort of thing that the telecomm companys on the wrong end of Net Neutrality would jump at as a chance to further their cause. I'm sure this is entirely possible; in theory, the idea is quite simple. I'm sad to see someone going out of their way to essentially further limit what we can do with thwe internet connection we pay good money for.
    It is my firm belief that if you pay for 3M down, 512K up, you should be able to use that for whatever the hell you want. No caveats, no addendums. That whole "BT and HD are choking the internet" thing is a load of bull.

Yeah but

[rsilvergun]

how are ISP's going to take to users maxing out their upload bandwidth 24/7 running commercial p2p clients? Somebody's got to pay for the infrastructure. I can't imagine the current networks aren't optimized for web browsing and light uploading in short bursts (i.e. pictures, word docs and the occasional wmv).

Re:Yeah but

[Capt James McCarthy]

It depends upon your ISP. Speakeasy's agreement states that I can use all of my bandwidth 24/7 without any problems. A SysAdmin's ISP.

Re:Yeah but

[microbrewer]

Intra Network bandwith is not that expensive for ISPs it when they start to share data with other networks it gets expansive .

The LX Systems techology in Peer Impact that is mentioned in the MIT article uses peer clustering techniques to keep as mach data in a ISPs domain as possible and they also use geo-location techniqies so the trafic doesnt travel long distances if it doesnt have to .

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.

Label P2P data? Is he effing kidding me?

[PopeRatzo]

"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."

We have lived in such a rare time. We had access to a communication tool like no other in history. And for a brief moment, it was free - totally free. Unencumbered by the dictates of rich and powerful, it was without parallel in history. Anybody who connected to this great web of systems had just as much chance to make his message heard as anyone else. My email of undying love to my wife-to-be received the same access and dispatch as the advertising messages of multi-national corporations. Anybody with a good idea could put it out there for the world to see and if it had merit, it would gain in popularity. Google sprang from this freedom. So did Slashdot. And goatse. And it was the unusual confluence of public money and free enterprise, along with some very smart and generous folks, putting energy into something new and unprecedented that made this happen. Take one bit out of the equation - say the taxpayer-financed Department of Defense, or a Linus Torvald, or a Netscape or the many other pioneers who contributed to this vast project - and it doesn't happen, or it happens in a way that prevents the kid in the basement in Des Moines the opportunity to play.

But people who have acquired wealth and power don't like it when any old slob can do what they do. I mean, what good is being rich and powerful if it doesn't let you move to the head of the line? Now, a race is on to crush the experiment in liberty that has been the Internet. I guess it was too radical, too much of a danger to tyranny and concentrated wealth, to last very long.

We should all feel privileged for having seen the rise of this rarest of creatures - the fully open agora of information and ideas - and we should all feel sad that it couldn't be defended from the greedy and power hungry.

"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.

Practicality and reality

[br00tus]

As far as broadcasts over the Internet done in a technically sensible way, old-timers may remember the MBONE initiative. This would have distributed broadcast video via IP Multicast. All of the "Tier One" ISPs I knew of, as well as many Tier Two ISPs had the capability to do this, the equipment in place - all they had to do was turn IP multicasting on on their Cisco routers. But management did not want to do this, because they thought it would fill their bandwidth up with video, which they didn't want. 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. After Napster began coming under legal assault, Gnutella was released with technology to specifically evade attempts to block it.

Aside from technical issues, I think decentralization, peer-to-peer and so forth is the way to go. I don't want to be the little receiver of content from the Giant Corporation with DRM, monopoly price increases and whatnot. To me it makes sense (like Mbone did) and gives me more freedom. It allows me to publish content, which Youtube and whatnot can not censor if they wish. 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. Which is why peer to peer decentralization has been under attack since day one.

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...

I'll believe it when I see it

[ben there...]

"Soon, the article asserts, the very same p2p-style networks that 'threatened' legitimate business may be the basis for most video-on-demand services."

This has been said many times in the past few years, but it's still not feasible. One big reason YouTube is popular is because it is "Instant-On." No waiting for it to download. Generally no waiting for "buffering."

BitTorrent and the like are incompatible with that feature. BitTorrent does not download videos (or any other file) in order, and it's actually somewhat harmful to the torrent to distribute the same chunks to everybody. BitTorrent works so well because it gives everybody on the torrent unique chunks to pass along. Not good for streaming.

Secondly, ISPs drastically limit upload. This means that to get even close to realtime streaming downloads, the seeders (the content provider in this case) need to have massive bandwidth available. Otherwise, it will take to long for the torrent to really get going with other seeders, and the first ~50 people will have to wait to watch. So you're back to having powerful centralized servers again.

Plus, what benefit do I have for letting them use my upload? With most broadband connections, saturating the upload makes browsing at the same time slow with high latency. It might make sense for community sharing, where the content provider can't afford the bandwidth, and therefore I would want to contribute, but it doesn't make sense for companies to demand that of me.

Asymmetry

[mollymoo]

P2P has one major problem - most broadband connections are asymmetric. Very, very asymmetric - ratios of 10:1 download:upload are common. Thus, in order for P2P to be able to saturate downstream bandwidth everyone would need to keep their P2P apps open for 10 times as long as it takes to download what they want. I don't think you're ever going to get a useful proportion of people to do this without a definite incentive. The cost of the bandwidth per movie is pretty small - I'd guess a few tens of cents. So econmically that's the value of the incentive you can offer. Are people really going to leave their PC on or an application open for hours and hours when they're not using it for the few tens of cents worth of incentive it would be economic to provide? I just don't see you average consumer doing this. It's cheaper to buy bandwidth from a major ISP than it is to 'buy' a hundred million tiny chunks of bandwidth from ten million customers. P2P works if people know they're helping the 'community' or getting something for free. Linux ISOs? P2P. Warez? P2P. Official Disney movies? Not so much.

If you want to reduce bandwidth usage then reduce the number of packets you have to send. Multicast is the right answer. MBone and IPV6 have been around for a long time now. They just aren't very profitable for ISPs, so the push will have to come from the content providers.

Re:Multicast, multicast,

[Raideen]

Why is this technology being, by-and-large, ignored?? Because we're still on a mostly IPv4 Internet and IPv4 has a very limited number of multicast addresses so content providers would have to fight for them and availability would depend on their schedules. Also, providers seem to be worried that it would saturate their networks. (Less bandwidth usage at the provider means that there will be more multicast services, meaning more clients, meaning more traffic across the upper tier provider's networks.) I'm waiting for what China has to show the rest of the world in the 2008 Olympics when they show off their fully IPv6 network.