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Enhancement To P2P Cuts Network Costs
psycho12345 sends in an article in News.com on a study, sponsored by Verizon and Yale, finding that if P2P software is written more 'intelligently' (by localizing requests), the effect of bandwidth hogging is vastly reduced. According to the study, redoing the P2P into what they call P4P can reduce the number of 'hops' by an average of 400%. With localized P4P, less of the sharing occurs over large distances, instead making requests of nearby clients (geographically). The NYTimes covers the development from the practical standpoint of Verizon's agreement with P2P company Pando Networks, which will be involved in distributing NBC television shows next month. So the network efficiencies will accrue to legal P2P content, not to downloads from The Pirate Bay.
How do you reduce the number of 'hops' by an average of 400%? Negative number of hops? Also, FP.
God, root, what is difference ?
Well, strictly speaking, incrementing the number would result in P3P, not P4P. Just as P2P means "Peer to Peer", P4P could be interpreted as "Peer for Peer", justifying the numeral.
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~ |rip/\/\aster /\/\onkey
... or is it encouraging to see network providers taking a stance other than p2p is bad? This looks good - kind of like "p2p isn't going away, so as long as we have to live with it, let's try to make the best of it"
I'm a student. I write iPhone apps.
Reducing hops by 400%, eh? That's a nice trick. Can we reduce bandwidth usage by the same amount? I wouldn't mind some free bandwidth.
I honestly can't figure out where "reduce by 400%" came from. They say the average hops were reduced from 5.5 hops to 0.89 hops, which is either 84% if you're not an idiot or 616% if you are. So I'm really quite confused here. Go figure.
Breaking Into the Industry - A development log about starting a game studio.
Personally I'm waiting for the next binary progression, Peer Ate Peer, or P8P. I'm not sure what it will do, but I'll bring popcorn to watch...
You are in a maze of twisted little posts, all alike.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/P/P2P_VERIZON?SITE=MITRA&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT
For this reason, Verizon doesn't suck for broadband uses. In my area, I have Verizon DSL (they haven't given us Fios yet, but they ran the fiber cables a few years back) and I don't have any port blocking (that's right folks, I can send email to ANY server), and they don't limit P2P or Bittorrent (My downloads are fast and fresh). And they haven't turned records over to the government (or at least not reportedly, yet). So far, in the category of BIG ISPs Comcast vs Verizon, Verizon is being the underdog. Which is funny, because start arguing cell phone policies and prices, and watch the argument change completely.
Belief? Hope? Preference?The Existential Vortex
less of the sharing occurs over large distances, instead making requests of nearby clients (geographically).
How about a BitTorrent client that gives preference to peers on the *same ISP*?
Yeah, less hops and all is great, but if an ISP can keep from having to hand off packets to a backbone, they'll save money and perhaps all the hue and cry over P2P will die down some. I'm sure Comcast would rather contract with UUnet to handle half of the current traffic destined for other ISPs than they do now.
Sort of a 'be nice to the ISPs and they'll be nicer to the users' scenario.
Less than one hop on average? Wow, they must use patented "You downloaded that three months ago, you wanker! Look on your damn file server!" technology.
How can I believe you when you tell me what I don't want to hear?
It would have made Internet broadcasting much more efficient, but it never took off. Why? Because providers never wanted to turn it on, fearing their tubes would get filled with video. So what happened? People broadcast videos anyhow, they just don't use the more efficient Mbone multicasting method.
Furthermore, when I download a video via Bittorrent, there are usually only a few people, whether they have a complete seed or not, who are sending out data. So how local they are doesn't matter. If there are more people connected, usually most people are sending data out at less than 10K, while there is one (or maybe 2) people sending data out at anywhere from 10K to 200K. So usually I wanted to be hooked to them, no matter where they are - I am getting data from them at many multiples of the average person.
I care about speed, not locality. The whole point of the Internet and World Wide Web is locality doesn't matter. Speed is what matters to me. For Verizon however, they would prefer most traffic goes over their own network - that way they don't have to worry about exchanging traffic with other providers and so forth. Another thing is - there is tons of fiber crisscrossing the country and world, we have plenty of inter-LATA bandwidth, the whole problem is with bandwidth from the home to the local Central Office. In a lot of countries, natural monopolies are controlled by the government - I always hear about how inefficient that would be and how backwards it would be, but here we have the "last mile" controlled by monopolies and they have been giving us decades-old technology for decades. In fact, the little attacks by the government have been rolled back, in a reversal of the Bell breakup, AT&T now owns a lot of last mile in this country. Hey, it's a safe monopoly that the capitalists, I mean, shareholders, I mean, investors can get nice fat dividends from in stead of re-investing in bleeding edge capital equipment, so why give people a fast connection to their homes? Better to spend money on lawyers fighting public wifi and the like, or commissars and think tanks to brag about how efficient capitalism is in the US of A in 2008.
You seem so certain.
Your traceroute program doesn't tell you when your traffic is being routed four hops through a tunnel to cut down on visible hops and to save space in the ISP's main routing table. Without the routing tables at hand you don't know the chances of being routed through your usual preferred route and through a backup route kept in case of congestion. Nothing from the customer end shows where companies like Level 3 and Internap have three or four layers of physical switches with VLANs piled on top between any two routers. Nothing tells you when you're in a star build-out of ten mid-sized cities that all go to the same NOC vs. when you're being mesh routed over lowest latency-weight round robin, although you might guess by statistical analysis and mesh routing of commercial ISP traffic outside the main NAPs is getting more and more rare.
There's a lot you can easily deduce, especially if your ISP uses honest and informative PTR records. There's still much that an ISP can do that you'll never, ever know about.
I worked for one ISP where we had 5 Internet connections in four cities to three carriers, but we served 25 cities with them. We had point-to-point lines from our dial-in equipment back to our public-facing NOCs. We had a further 18 or so cities served by having the lines back-hauled from those towns to our dial-in equipment. We had about 12k dialup customers and a few hundred DS1, fractional DS1, frame relay, and DSL customers. Everyone's traffic went through one of two main NOCs on a good day, and their mail, DNS, AAA, and the company's web site traffic never touched the public Internet unless we were routing around trouble. In a couple of places we even put RADIUS slaves and DNS caching servers right in the POP.
I worked for another that served over 40k dial-up and wireless customers by the time they sold. We had what we called "island POPs". Each local calling area we served had dial-in equipment and a public-facing 'Net connection. Authentication, Authorization, and Accounting, DNS, Mail, and the ISP's website traffic all flowed over the public Internet except in the two towns we had actual NOCs. There were tunnels set up between routers that made traffic from the remote sites to the NOCs look like local traffic on traceroute, but that was mainly for our ease of routing and to be able to redirect people to the internal notification site when they needed to pay their late bills. We (I, actually) also set up L2TP so that we could use dial-up pools from companies like CISP who would encapsulate a dial-in session over IP, authenticate it against our RADIUS, and then allow the user to surf from their network. We paid per average used port per month to let someone else handle the customer's net connection while we handled marketing, billing, and support.
The first ISP I worked for had lines to four different carriers in four different NAPs in four different states, lots of point-to-point lines for POPs, and a high-speed wireless (4-7 MBps, depending on weather, flocks of birds, and such) link across a major river to tie together two NOCs in two states. Either NOC could route all of the traffic for all the dozens of small towns in both states as long as one of our four main connections and that wireless stayed up (and all the point-to-point ones did, too). If the wireless went down, the two halves of the network could still talk, but over the public Internet. That one got to about 10k customers before it was sold.
At any of those ISPs, I couldn't tell you exactly who was going to be able to get online or where they were going to be able to get to without my status monitoring systems. On one, all the customers could get online even without the ISP having access to the Internet, but they could only see resources hosted at the ISP. Yet that one might drop five towns from a single cable break. Another one might keep 10k people offline due to a routing issue at a tier-1 NAP, but everyone else was okay. However, if that one's NOC went offline, anyone surfing in other
Even better, change the letter too. I'm waiting for B4B: Beer 4 Beer.
mmmm... Beer.
Jiggity