P2P: Friend of Carriers, Savior of Online Video?

Streaming Media East, NYC--Over the past two months, peer-to-peer (P2P) networking has gone from the source of all evil to being a miracle cure for distributing video if a panel of speakers at Streaming Media East are to be believed.  It won't be IPTV, but P2PTV, if service providers and P2P companies can cooperate together.

Currently, "closed" P2P networks account for at least three-fourths of upstream bandwidth on the Internet and at least half the downstream bandwidth of service providers, said Marty Lafferty, CEO of the Distributed Computing Industry Association. The problems have resulted from closed P2P schemes working to evade ISP monitoring and network optimization efforts.

Lafferty says the sea change has occurred by combining openness to P2P networking, allowing carriers to see what sort of traffic is going on and enabling them to fine tune network transfers to reduce router hop count--how far you have to move traffic--and keep copying local rather than crossing service provider boundaries.

P4P--Proactive network Provider Participation for P2P--technology has already demonstrated drastic improvements in bandwidth and network utilization. Verizon testing with Pando Networks earlier this year demonstrated bandwidth usage decreasing more than 50 percent. Other benefits included faster download speeds for users and much shorter router hops to move data (from an average of five hops to less than one). Verizon is a believer and says P4P technology can help scale their network and help deliver more video.

Comcast will be triaing Pando's technology later this year and has also invested in Seattle-based GridNetworks, a startup that delivers high-definition video using P2P technology.

For more:
- Lafferty's P2P presentation slides from Streaming Media East

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