The Internet is about to drown in digital video. Hui Zhang thinks peer-to-peer networks could come to the rescue.
Ted Stevens, the 83-year-old senior senator from Alaska, was widely ridiculed last year for a speech in which he described the Internet as "a series of tubes." Yet clumsy as his metaphor may have been, Stevens was struggling to make a reasonable point: the tubes can get clogged. And that may happen sooner than expected, thanks to the exploding popularity of digital video.
TV shows, YouTube clips, animations, and other video applications already account for more than 60 percent of Internet traffic, says CacheLogic, a Cambridge, England, company that sells media delivery systems to content owners and Internet service providers (ISPs). "I imagine that within two years it will be 98 percent," adds Hui Zhang, a computer scientist at Carnegie Mellon University. And that will mean slower downloads for everyone.
Zhang believes help could come from an unexpected quarter: peer-to-peer (P2P) file distribution technology. Of course, there’s no better playground for piracy, and millions have used P2P networks such as Gnutella, Kazaa, and BitTorrent to help themselves to copyrighted content. But Zhang thinks this black-sheep technology can be reformed and put to work helping legitimate content owners and Internet-backbone operators deliver more video without overloading the network.
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That Makes no sense Until recently bit torrent was responsible for what 50-65% of all internet traffic? How is clogging ISP’s upstream bandwidth given to consumers going to alleviate the issue? everyone will just get the SAME AMOUNT of traffic and content albeit slower.
Think about it for a minute if this miraculous P2P network will have the ability to distribute all the content needed at fast speeds (already exists – bit torrent) how is this going to negate the issue that 60% of traffic is video 60% of traffic will STILL BE VIDEO! just obtained through a different means.
I hate how P2P is looked at as some fucking pie in the sky solution to everything ISP problems content distribution problems economic problems movie and music industry problems freedom of speech problems. NO! P2P simply is what it is a really great method to trade shit nothing more. It is not a threat and it is also not a cure all.
Actually psilaxs it could clear up some internet traffic. Currently if you are a company wanting to set up a download service for multimedia you would be sending traffic from wherever your server is if your server is in Florida and you want to send a file to Canada its traveling over allot of lines. Now lets say you start the same service only using p2p. Now their are multiple people acting as servers all over the place. So even if the main file is in Florida someone within your city may have the file. This file will have to travel much less distance to get to your house and will suck up less traffic. Personally what bugs me is that rarely if ever are they giving people a reason to upload files. These files are now coming off of your bandwidth and running your hard drive to the ground so what benefit is their for the consumer?
No Mountain (we have been disagreeing a lot) you sidetracked yourself. Intra-city or Canada? it will still travel over the same lines going to Canada whether it is being distributed via P2P or a server. It will travel over LESS lines being sent from one central location rather than everyone acting as a distribution hub. Traffic is traffic. The only advantage to nebulous distribution methods is for people like you and me we do not have to pay for content distribution we can use Bit Torrent YouTube meta Café etc etc add nauseum.
This will not offset cost for ISP’s only people that want to send files to large amounts of people but the backbone remains the backbone.