Slashdot Mirror
ISPs & P2P, Getting Along Without Getting Cozy
penguin-geek writes "Researchers at Northwestern University have discovered a way to ease the tension between ISPs and P2P users. As we all know, there's been a growing tension between Internet Service Providers (ISPs) and their customers' P2P file-sharing services, and this has driven service providers to forcefully reduce P2P traffic at the expense of unhappy subscribers and the risk of government investigations. Recently, some ISPs have tried to fix the problem through partnerships with certain P2P applications. The Ono project represents an alternative solution: a software service that allows P2P clients to efficiently identify nearby peers, without requiring any kind of cozy relationship between ISPs and P2P users. Using results collected from over 150,000 users, they have found that their system locates peers along paths that have two orders of magnitude lower latency and 30% lower loss rates than those picked at random by BitTorrent, and that these high-quality paths can lead to significant improvements in transfer rates. In challenged settings where peers are overloaded in terms of available bandwidth, Ono provides a 31% average download-rate improvement; in environments with large available bandwidth, Ono increases download rates by 207% on average (and improves median rates by 883%). Ono is available as a plugin for the Azureus BitTorrent client, an open tracker and an standalone service you can integrate into any P2P system."
Well, whatever you think of P2P, you must admit that it was designed for the purpose of piracy. That's just a matter of historical fact. Some companies that want to profiteer on it (e.g. BitTorrent, Inc.) are trying to get legitimate media outlets to use P2P, but it's unwise of them to do it; it might prevent crackdowns on piracy due to "substantial noninfringing uses." The best thing to do about P2P is to develop client/server alternatives to it. They will be more efficient and can be made at least as fast.