AVonGauss
Premium,MVM
join:2007-11-01
Boynton Beach, FL
1 edit | An Opinion...
I am going to disclaim this post as from an engineering side (writing software) I don't tend to work a lot with BitTorrent applications and from a user side I often find it more annoying than rewarding so I might be a bit biased.
To use a cheezy clique, I think we're getting the cart in front of the horse in this and similar articles. The broader and more immediate question is still will the idea even take off? I am not involved with the effort, but as an outsider it looks like there are a couple different business objectives trying to be achieved and I'm not sure they all compliment each other.
For this or a similar effort to be successful, I believe ISPs will need to implement this as an open and free "topology type" service with an open API that a client (inside ISP) or server (outside ISP) application can take advantage of without regard to the underlying application (i.e. BitTorrent). This may be the intent, but I personally have not seen this clearly demonstrated yet. In fairness, most of this seems to have been a corporate driven effort so far and may only now be getting ready to move in to more of a community style endeavour.
BitTorrent, the (sole?) P2P application that P4P seems to be constructed around, evolved to satisfy specific needs and desires by the Internet user - some legal, some not so much so. If those same needs are not met as they can be using today's techniques, it is doubtful that this will succeed in mass adoption.
To give one specific example, the typical user will not mind helping a company such as Canonical or Revision 3 distribute their content (P2P style) as they do not directly charge that consumer for the download. However, for company's such as Microsoft or Universal who do want to charge for their content or the original purchase, people are generally less inclined to use their connection to help save that company some cash in distribution charges - even if it's a service pack. Companies have been trying for years to get mass adoption of P2P technologies to efficiently (read: cost effectively) distribute online content, most have been unsuccessful and hence the expansion of CDNs such as Akamai. |
