1,000,000 Gigabytes Delivered
By Marguerite Reardon
Staff Writer, CNET News.com
Peer-to-peer technology has gotten a bad rap for years, but a group of Internet service providers led by Verizon Communications is working to harness the technology to reduce network traffic and speed up video downloads on the Web.
Since the days of file-sharing networks like Napster, which allowed people to exchange songs on their computer hard drives with others on the Internet, peer-to-peer technology has been demonized in the press. The entertainment industry has pegged it as a tool for piracy. And recently, ISPs have blamed it for clogging their networks.
But the technology, which was originally developed for the research community to share huge files over the Internet, is increasingly being used by legitimate video distribution services like the BBC's iPlayer, voice over Internet Protocol service Skype, and Internet video start-up Joost. And as more high-bandwidth applications like video make their way onto the Web, peer-to-peer, or P2P as it's commonly called, will be used even more. This means that Internet service providers and content owners will have to find ways to work with the powerful P2P technology--whether they want to or not--if they hope to survive.
"Peer-to-peer has entered the mainstream," said Cynthia Brumfield, president of the market consultancy Emerging Media Dynamics, which is publishing a report on the P2P market next week. "The technology is being used by companies large and small for legitimate commercial purposes and with good reason. It's a very efficient distribution technology. But it has to be managed, and that's what needs to be figured out."
In an effort to come up with a solution, Verizon Communications and P2P technology provider Pando Networks joined forces last year with researchers at Yale University to figure out a way to put the file-sharing technology to better use. The companies and the university formed the P4P Working Group (P4PWG) within the Distributed Computing Industry Association (DCIA) . So far the group has signed up nine other members to the cause. These companies include other big telephone companies, such as AT&T and Telefonica, as well as big technology companies like Cisco Systems and Verisign.
Using basic subscriber information from ISPs, researchers claim to have developed a solution that can reduce a provider's P2P bandwidth consumption on their networks by about 60 percent, while also speeding up P2P downloads by nearly a third. This month, Verizon and Pando will start testing the new system on a real network in the U.S. AT&T and Spanish ISP Telefonica also plan to conduct tests.
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