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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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.
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