P2P Set-top Boxes To Revolutionize Internet

An anonymous reader writes "The European Commissions 7th Framework Program (FP7) is working on a project called Nano Data Centers (NADA) as part of the its future Internet initiative. NADA will seek to build an Internet architecture that delivers data from the edge of the Internet using set top boxes and Peer-to-Peer technology, instead of the network-centric architecture that stores and delivers content from data centers via Internet backbones. NADA is proposing a network of hundreds of thousands of set top boxes, hugely popular in Europe, to be essentially split into two — one side is the user interface side, the other a virtualised Peer-to-Peer storage client that stores and sends media in the same way a data center would. Ideally there would be millions of these boxes each acting as a mini data center — hence the Nano Data Center moniker. The NADA project is convincing enough to have attracted some of Europe's largest telecommunications companies. Set top box manufacturer, Thomson SA, and European ISP, Telefonica, are among nine contributing partners to the NADA project. NADA could see a dramatic reduction in the size and frequency of data centers that serve all kinds of media over the Internet."

Comments

Imagine the possibilities...

[It doesn't come easy]

Develop an application that can inject whatever you want to share (porn, movies, music, pictures, computer software, stolen identity data, the list is endless) and you would have instant and free worldwide delivery. All you would have to do is insert the data at a public box (one not tied to your house or account) and there's no way to track it back to you.

ISPs will love this

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm sure that the ISPs will not be happy about this idea - I see that none are on the partners list.

Liability

[azzuth]

How responsable would you be for the content stored on your Nano Data Center... I can see tons and tons of lawsuits.

Another thought, how much redundancy would be required to protect the data should Joe-Six-Pack accidently wipe his data. Or get his set top infected while surfing for porn.

This could be a good way to distribute malware, being that we'd (presumably) have access to someone else's data within our datacenter. What would stop me from replacing the content of the datacenter side of my box. Physical access is a bad idea.

There is also a privacy issue. If we know what is on our datacenter, we could track incoming requests and build a database of users/ips that like whatever content we are serving.

Re:Liability

[diggitzz]

This isn't really too much different from Freenet or many Grid Computing initiatives that have come and changed.

Presumably, the data on the Nano Data Center will be encrypted and essentially stripe raid-ed across the network. This is how modern wide-area data distribution networks are currently being implemented privately, and the technology itself circumvents most of the problems you mention.

Responsibility: It's hard to argue that a user is responsible for encrypted content on his/her node, given that it just isn't accessible for review in the first place.

Redundancy: Files can be kept in pieces, with info (like checksums, etc) available elsewhere on the net to reconstruct the data in the case of loss.

Malware: This problem will probably be avoided along with the redundancy problem, by checking checksums of file parts and reconstructing the files if the check goes bad.

Overall, a distributed network is much more difficult to attack than a centralized one, since the missing pieces can easily be rebuilt or reconstructed if a node goes down or goes haywire.

But that's just my opinion ;)

Cost SHIFTING, not Cost SAVINGS.

[nweaver]

The problem with putting anything that provides bandwidth to others on the edge is that it is really inefficient from an aggregate cost-of-bandwidth view.

Bandwidth to a colo facility costs an order of magnitude less than bandwidth to an end-user's location. Thus shifting to a P2P or distributed architecture like this for providing content doesn't actually reduce the costs, instead it substantially increases them. It just shifts the cost from the content provider to the end user or the end user's ISP.

The only real savings is cooling: at the user's home, they don't have the thermal load so they don't need the AC to cool the end-point node. But OTOH, the end user's cost of electricity is higher, so that may be a wash as well.

No thanks.

[Exanon]

Here is what is going to happen:

The big media companies are going to have a finger in designing these boxes.
They are going to lock them down.
They are going to use YOUR bandwidth to push THEIR content that you may not even have bought or have access to.

I am not going to let a media company leech off my bandwidth so that they can push content I don't even own, want or can access.

Clog the Net? Yes. Revolutionize it? No.

[Brett Glass]

Internet bandwidth is most expensive at the edges, and latency to other users is the longest. It's the worst place from which to serve up data; you want to do that from servers in the "middle" of the Net. What's more, the most scarce and valuable resource of the Internet is bandwidth near the edges. Put the servers out there, and you'll raise the cost of broadband deployment and exhaust the resources that are already there. Anyone can buy space on a fast, cheap server at a server farm for far less than it costs to serve data from the edge. So, why don't the people who are running this project just do that? There's only one possible reason: they want to get users and ISPs to give them these resources for free. Which just doesn't wash. If use of these devices became widespread it would either drive up the cost of broadband tremendously or be banned from networks outright by businesses and ISPs. And deservedly so. It's a bad idea.

Re:MOD PARENT UP

[mrogers]

The similarity, conceptually, between NADA and Freenet is quite interesting.

If ordinary users are able to publish data anonymously using NADA, I will come to your house and pay you one thousand pounds to watch me eating my hat. If, on the other hand, it's just a way for the same old centralised media companies to distribute their DRMed data more cheaply, I will not.