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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."
in Spanish.
In unrelated news, RIAA sues Europe
"But your honor, its not a bittorrent client, its just my nano data center..."
... oh wait.
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.
The NSA: The only part of the US government that actually listens.
P2P is vile and evil. The RIAA and MPAA told me so.
I'm sure that the ISPs will not be happy about this idea - I see that none are on the partners list.
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.
While their video sales business is DOA, this is what they're up to: http://www.bittorrent.com/devices/
That's been changing. People are now more aware of applications they can use to get the most out of their broadband. That's why we saw questions asked recently of the BBC's iPlayer. Who will foot the bill for the increase in bandwidth, we were asked. The ISPs? Or the BBC, who have 'caused' such an increase in traffic?
The answer is the ISPs, obviously. That's what they get paid for, by the customer - and usually the customer has already paid more than once, without realising it. In many cases an ISP's infrastructure has been HUGELY subsidised by public funds, and many have frittered away a lot of money they could have spent preparing for some kind of a high-bandwidth revolution.
But every time a new trend starts, and a new high bandwidth application becomes easily available to the masses, the situation gets a little worse for our ISPs. They're not nearly as prepared for this as they should be.
Here's a new application of P2P, one that could very easily replace regular scheduled television, and it's as easy to use as plugging in a box.
Eventually, the ISPs will have to raise those prices, and not just by a little bit, but by enough to tear up and relay a lot of their infrastructure.
This was bound to happen. P2P is very useful technology. The RIAA and friends have approached the copyright issue by (more or less) tarring this technology as either immoral or just plain wrong. Sooner or later, somebody else with a bit of backing was going to leverage P2P to solve a problem and then come face-to-face with the RIAA. This is just another illustration of how the RIAA have approached this whole thing all wrong.
I'd like to see NADA become commercial to see how this would pan out.
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.
Test your net with Netalyzr
What exactly is the edge of the internet? Can you cut with it? Should there be some kind of safety warning?
And how exactly does a series of tubes have an "edge"?
Those who live by the sword, get shot by those who live by the gun...
I gather Cable + movies (maybe eventually games) is what they are after here. It seems as though the idea is to be able to deliver content faster and with less stress on a centralized data center than we have now for things like digital cable et al.
The thing I am wondering though is how would they maintain quality with such an uncontrollable system. Basically it seems that it will, of course, benefit the content delivery company in reducing bandwidth overhead. But where is the benefit to the user? What happens when a particular "torrent" is less popular? Will it be able to stream fast enough for the end user to see the video in reasonably close to real-time? Or, would they be distributing every file equally? essentially consuming the user's bandwidth and hard drive space for files they don't use/need/watch?
meep
The internet revolts more often than post-colonial Africa.
http://twitter.com/OLDTELEGRAM
I plan to prove this false once and for all, by sailing around the internet and arriving on east Asian web sites from the other side.
I just can't stand settop boxes. I've yet to have ever seen one from the cable company that is responsive or as capable as anything homebrewed. I loved my old tivo, but, I gotta say, newerones that I've seen...seem to be slower than the old ones?
In the past...I'd opted for just plain analog cable...just to avoid the stupid settop box, the extra fees, etc.
Let's also consider how locked the cable co's boxes are.
Since I've put together a couple of MythTV boxes, I do enjoy it. My last one may need a bit of a faster processor...I built this media box pre-katrina, and didn't really have much need for HD stuff. I now have it loaded with a Haupauge analog card...and have a HDHomerun dual tuner unit...one spliced into the cable feed and one into an antenna. The great thing is...I can set it up to record what I want, when I want..keep things as I want, backup to DVD if I please...timeshift and send it to every room i want. The only thing I can't do, is pay tv stations, and frankly, I've not see that many. I'd like to get the HD of Foodtv and some others, but, that's about it.
I'm not interested in recording things, and sending it out for free on a P2P system, I just want to use things for personal consumption, but, the cable co's won't let us do that. Until then, I'd do not want their set top box. They are slower than what I can do, they aren't as flexible (can't have more than 2 tuners in them usually), and they charge fees (one for each tv in the home?).
Does anyone out there in the US actually LIKE the set top boxes they have? Would you not rather have different choices?
I keep thinking, if they'd make it easier to buy 3rd party stuff (or DIY materials) that would allow YOU to get the content you pay for and use it as you please for private consumption, there's be less need for 'pirated' content to be out there, etc.
Let the consumer have more choice and charge a fair rate, and I think 98% of the people out there would have no problem with paying for content and hooking into their system.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
What, no link? Major FTLC (Failure to Look Cool).
Should be Here .
Test your net with Netalyzr
Vaporware from an organization called Nada.
I laughed out loud with that summary.
Eek!
Let me get this straight in my head. You want to charge me for your service and then use my bandwidth and electricity? You want to run bittorrent 24/7 on my internet connection to distribute files that I may not be allowed to view myself? How does this benefit me? (Listens to crickets chripping in the deafening quiet.) That's what I thought...
If you use P2P instead of centralized server to move the same total amount of data, what's the problem? In fact, it should be beneficial for the ISP if most of the traffic is going within its own network; any decept P2P software should prefer the topologically nearest peers. I thought it's mostly external traffic that the ISPs have to pay for, while their own infrastructure has fixed costs.
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
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.
Move along. Nothing to see here.
The similarity, conceptually, between NADA and Freenet is quite interesting.
I love my Hauppauge MediaPVR hooked to my SageTV server. But yes, you are 100% correct, for HD and home brew, I see nothing other than OTA options, and I get terrible reception so I currently have no option to do it myself legally. I would pay the fee for the HD content from my local cable company if I could hook it to my media server. Like yourself, I am not interested in sharing it to the world, or even the next door neighbor, just personal time shifting as I never watch when programmers want me to watch.
I kick myself for not documenting the idea presented in TFA as I recall reading about their grant several months ago and was very upset as I had this or very similar idea about 4 or 5 years ago. I could have swore I detailed it in a post here at /. last year, but could not find it so my loss.
Being a spelling & grammar Nazi is a sign you do not poses the intelligence to contribute to the conversation
Johnson: Why don't we get the users to use peer to peer software to distribute media to each other?
ISP CEO: No that's a terrible idea! They'll get sued by the RIAA and MPAA. I have a better idea. Why don't we get the users to use peer to peer *hardware* technology to distribute media to each other?!?!?
Johnson: Brilliant idea sir! That way we can charge them for the hardware :P
Don't kid yourself. It's the size of the regexp AND how you use it that counts.
Either this scheme's proponents are hoping to sneak a lot of their costs onto other people's plates, or they have a seriously dubious grasp of the economics of IT.
In effect, bittorrent's success is not based on its efficiency as a file transfer mechanism(which is actually quite lousy); but on its effectiveness as a download micropayment system(which isn't fantastic; but is better than anything else we have). Bittorrent reduces the cost, to the distributor, of distributing a file by making it easy for downloaders to contribute their own bandwidth. Even more conveniently, for anybody with a fixed-price internet connection, the marginal cost of their bandwidth contribution is near zero. Unfortunately, the total cost of distribution is actually fairly high, since bittorrent uses a lot of "last mile" bandwidth(particularly upstream last mile bandwidth) which is quite limited and expensive compared to bulk datacenter bandwidth. If micropayment were possible, and if individuals paid for bandwidth per-unit-use, rather than fixed rate, it would be cheaper for them to just pay the file distributor's upload costs directly, at bulk rate, rather than "in kind" at retail rates. The exact same argument applies for electricity and disk space. Bittorrent is great because it is an efficient method of aggregating the limited amounts available at zero(ish) marginal cost, not because it is actually efficient per unit.
Given this, I find it hard to judge TFA's scheme kindly. Either it is based on a frankly delusional understanding of relative costs, or it is essentially a cynical attempt to shift costs onto end users. This will only get worse if the ISP pressure toward caps and overage fees gets stronger, since the amount of "free" bandwidth will decline, and the impact of shifted costs will become much more direct.
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.