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Researchers Suggest P2P As Solution To Video Domination of The Internet
JPawlak writes "NewScientistTech reports that big businesses may be realizing the benefits of P2P technologies. Blizzard uses it to distribute patches for World of Warcraft, and now researchers at Microsoft are indicating internet users may have to use it to help distribute online video clips. The growing cost associated with delivering such content may be becoming prohibitive for some companies. 'The team also suggest a way to prevent Internet Service Providers' costs jumping when their users start uploading much more data. The trick is to allow sharing only between people with the same provider, when data transactions are free. That restriction would cut the pool of sharers into smaller groups, meaning MSN's servers would have to do more to fill any gaps in the service. But costs could still fall by more than half, simulations showed.'"
Sharing among people on the same network is only going to be effective for popular data. Not to mention I have a feeling Comcast would still send tell you you are using too much bandwidth even if it is all coming from within their network.
Libertarian Leaning Political Discussion Forum.
Would this not be regulated by the market? If you don't want to use the extra bandwidth, don't use the product/service.
About the only thing it's not useful for is SSH and FTP.
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But it doesn't seem reasonable to dismiss the system yet, when it could benefit everyone.
... but then again, take a look at the caliber of the people running the show here in the United States. Largely it comes down to the Telcos and Comcast, and a few other big ISPs, none of whom are interested in anything but profit maximization. I guarantee you that if they find a way to reduce their costs using this or any other technology, they will simply pass the savings on to themselves and their stockholders. We customers will never see a penny of it in terms of our monthly expenses: all we might hope for would be an improvement in service quality, but I wouldn't bank on that either.
True, I suppose
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
I probably did not express my thoughts clear enough. Let's give it another go.
There are two portions to a P2P network - discovery and data fetch. Discovery determines where do you get your data from and fetch is the actual data flow. An ISP can confine a P2P service to its own network by either limiting discovery or by limiting the actual fetches.
The discovery is where the P2P networks lamely emulate a multicast application. They try to determine if a piece of data A is present in any of the surrounding nodes B,C,D,E,F. In order to do that they in the trivial case transmit to each node. In the more modern networks they transmit to hypernodes and get info from there. In either case they try to emulate a multicast network via a tunnel mesh (just the way people try to emulate Multicast on ATM LANE).
Compared to that a discovery mechanism based on multicast with a unicast reply can give you the information on where exactly is the piece which you are interested with one request. There is usually no need for hypernodes either. It just works. Magically. Further to this, you can set your discovery scope to find nodes which are 1,2,3...n hops away by tweaking TTL. Further to this, it is a true P2P network - totally serverless. If you throw in PKI authentication you can also make it as secure as you wish.
Baker's Law: Misery no longer loves company. Nowadays it insists on it
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