Pando's Building a Better P2P Mousetrap

All these folks are basing their entire business on a flawed idea: That everyone wants to watch/listen the same things.

The only reason people listen to certain music, watch certain TV shows, and watch specific movies is because it's all that's available to them. Once their eyes are opened to the myriad of choices available, P2P delivery of anything from on-network peers will drop drastically.

Unless you're a House, Mythbusters, or The Universe fan, I won't be seeding anything TV related to you anytime soon and I doubt very seriously you'll like either my music selection or the movies I watch.

At least, that's what my girlfriend tells me.

Ya know Matt, I had that same (?)problem...
What I have/had as shares, most people never seemed to request.

That is, when I used to use BT often.
My share ratio was bad because of this.
Ah well, I have moved on to better things.

The selling point for ISPs is that each peer serves only to peers on the same ISP, reducing expensive inter-ISP transfers. Of course this implies a star topology, where only the original source serves content to "foreign" ISPs. The latter ties in with the selling point for content distributors, namely that they retain control of who gets what content.

So it's good for commercial distributors and their customers, and for anyone willing to install Pando's closed-source, proprietary software to get or distribute content that Pando approves of. It's of no use for anyone who wants to distribute or retrieve any *other* content (not from the commercial services, or not Pando-approved). Nor is it any good for anyone who doesn't trust the Pando software.

Thus, the system can take some load off ISPs to the extent the ISP subscribers use Pando/P4p instead of bittorrent or other p2p. But there will still be users who prefer the selection on p2p, the freedom from DRM or fees, or prefer to distribute outside of Pando/p2p. And that remains a legitimate activity, despite some copyright violations. So this won't solve the whole p2p bandwidth issue. In fact, I expect it won't make much of a dent in it.

its not necessary a bandwidth problem but the multiple connections the p2p systems opens and closes so rapidly that taxes the systems.

3 Mythbusters =). Great show and very educational in a sort of everything gets broken or explodes type way.

This "P4P" nonsense is an attempt to quash legitimate complaints from ISPs that P2P is hogging their resources. But it really does nothing to solve the problem. P2P by its very nature is a way of setting up servers on ISPs' networks, taking their upstream bandwidth without paying for it. And "P4P" does nothing to solve that problem.

If content providers want to use ISPs' networks for their servers, they need to pay them for it. It's just fair. Trying to do it without paying their freight is theft of service -- and will result in higher costs for users. If the P4P people really wanted to do something useful, they'd work out a payment scheme which paid the ISPs for the use of their networks.

It is a viable solution for LEGALLY distributed content. But it won't be adopted by those trackers that do nothing but serve up stolen music and movies. And, unfortunately, that still is the largest majority of P2P traffic.

WTF?
Ya know friend, if I were to light up a P2P application and upload anything, I would be using some of the upstream that I pay for each month.

Tell me, tell all of us, WTF do we all pay our ISPs for?

Whether I am blasting a single file to a single person or several files to several people, I am still using the connection *I PAY FOR*.

Everyone(99.99%) I have ever sent or received a file from has used a paid for connection.

You're funny!

It seems like this solution points to a better solution for the ISPs. That is if they want to support BT. They can look at their traffic and see which Torrent sites are creating the heaviest traffic and set up their own peers on their network to help serve that content. With a little bit of work they can prevent the ISP peer from feeding sites off of their network so it would provide fast updates for their customers.

Of course without a good deal of work on software to keep the site up to date, it's going to take a person to watch over the torrents and make sure the site has the latest torrents that are creating off-network traffic. However, for a company like Comcast it makes plenty of sense since they have a large number of customers and a great deal of off-network traffic.

Bullshit! Users/subscribers, including so-called content providers, already pay for their upstream and downstream bandwidth in the form of the monthly contract amount for internet service, and by providing the content that drives the the money machine. P2P just lightens the load on any single ISP/network by distributing the source files/seeds around. It all equals out in the end. Well, except for those who don't use P2P, and their lack of use just leaves more bandwidth on the table. Everyone using P2P is a content provider, except for the leeches who don't seed or share. Big commercial content providers pay their way as well. Take away the content from the web, and there is very little to drive customers to subscribe service. ISPs get paid for bandwidth up-front, and then get paid for advertising, click stream data, profiling their customers for various commercial interests, etc.. Time for them to stop bitchin' about how they don't get paid double or triple for the same bandwidth they have already oversold. If they want to get paid for "phantom bandwidth", maybe they should think about compensating customers for the raping they give privacy every minute of every day. If they don't like being "dumb-pipe" providers, they can always find some other form of employment.

" P2P by its very nature is a way of setting up servers on ISPs' networks, taking their upstream bandwidth without paying for it."

1.Why should servers be against the TOS anyway?
In what way, if a person buys a connection that is X MB down and Y MB up are they not paying for their bandwidth if they use the Y upstream capabilities of the line they pay for? Why should we accept that if you use bandwidth to download you are behaving acceptably but if you use bandwidth to upload you are stealing from the isp?

2.If the network was designed only for one way distribution of content then why shouldn't the onus be on a company that wants to be an internet service provider to adapt the network design to be able to meet the two way communication needs of the internet? In other words why should we allow a company to redefine internet service as a one way content distribution system?

3. I understand that a person running a server is, in general, more likely to consume greater amounts of bandwidth but why can't this be dealt with using bandwidth caps, such as we have had for quite a long time? In other words, rather than outlawing uses such as running a server you simply place a boundary like 100GB a month of transfer. Again I don't understand why certain uses of a communication connection should be classified as stealing while other uses are not. This is just another way of discriminating against certain applications when the application, or the way the person chooses to use their connection, shouldn't be a concern for the isp.

That would work, but it would expose the ISPs to liability for any copyright violations. Maybe a lot of torrent traffic on a given day is users getting a recent Hollywood movie - if the ISP served pieces of that torrent, the copyright holder would sue and win right away.

To avoid this and still save "outside" traffic, the ISP would have to inspect all the torrents and serve only those which are not infringing. But this would be a big person-hours burden, and would invite liability for torrents they were carrying but not seeding (because they would then know which are infringing and which are not).

This P4P type local peering can be added to generic BT software. All that is needed is to do a WHOIS for x.x.x.x@whois.arin.net (where x.x.x.x is your IPN) and you get back your local net block. For me this would be NETBLK-OOL-4BLK (NET-67-80-0-0-1) 67.80.0.0-67.87.255.255. This would allow my BT program to favor peers with 67.80/16 IPNs and keep the traffic primarily on my ISP's network. I can connect to other ISP's peers (up to my max-peer limit) but will choose local peers over remote peers. I am not sure if there is a way to get a full map of my ISP's Netblocks (so I can add local peers on other Netblocks) but at least this will locate MY Netblock.

This is a very good discussion, and it's great to see a group of informed people disussing technical issues.

One thing I'd like to point out is that P4P isn't in any way proprietary to Pando. While we ran this test (with Yale, and the ISP's) and issued this press release, the P4P Working Group is open to any ISP and P2P company to participate freely. There are over 50 organizations in the P4P Working Group, including all of the major P2P companies, and many ISP's and universities, working together so that we all benefit by making p2p be more efficient. My hope is that all p2p networks and ISP's implement P4P, because that's best for the p2p industry.

A second point that I'll make is that P4P doesn't constrain the p2p network to only communicate within an ISP. P4P provides guidance to the p2p network so that it can choose to connect peers within an ISP if they are available, because that's best for the users (local data = fastest downloads) but the p2p network can freely connect peers across ISP's, etc., as needed to deliver data.

I think the operative words here are "CAN BE". How many will go to that trouble?

No, they are basing it on the fact that they won't to make a mousetrap that can only deliver media content that is ISP controlled. Geez, even a 3 year only could figure that out by the picture. (you really should have added a "first post" at the end, then I could have forgave you)

This P2P "technology" would be no good for non licensed content since the ISP will just filter, throttle or (insert any net neutrality violation here)

That depends. If I were a BitTorrent client publisher, added this support, and advertised this new feature, I can see this capability being used to take the wind out of the sails of the ISPs that claim the P2P uses too much of their Internet Bandwidth. The existence of this feature would be a "meeting the ISP half way" gesture and place the ball into the ISP's court to make a similar gesture (or just shut up and knock off with their anti-P2P rhetoric and shenanigans).