Verizon makes nice with P2P

From an ISP’s point of view, P2P traffic can appear to be exceptionally daunting. If they choose to block it, as some have accused almost all of the major US ISPs of doing, then their networks would become ghost networks, with virtually no traffic in sight. But if they embrace it, their networks are fast moving crazy places, …

[John Saunders]

Verizon needs help with P2P?

"Making nice" would hardly be in the spirit of the telcos' recent attempts to extract revenue from content providers like Google, etc., nor would it be an appetizing end result of spending 10s of billions of dollars on FIOS, which is all about charging extra for 'premium' content.

I speculate that this group's product will be an approved (and meterable) P2P client and network protocol (this is where the 'P2P suppliers' come in) and a plan (with TOS as the core) to steer a large proportion of the customer base to that client.

This effort may fail, but the possibility of reaching the two goals of extracting money from the customer *and* charging the content provider (who is the customer in this scenario) in one slick move may be too alluring to resist.

Paris, who knows how to not resist temptation.

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh great, more "voluntary" cooperation.

"...If mostly copyrighted material appears to be traveling across the network, then perhaps that API co-operation is refused by the network nodes and the resulting traffic packets will be treated as low priority..."

And who exactly determines this on the fly?

[J]

FIOS

I got a little ad flyer for FIOS this weekend. Curious about this fiber optic thingie, I controlled the natural impulse to immediately trash it and read it.

Something like: "Blazin-fast internet access at up to 5/2 Mbps speeds". Or similar. What matters is the "up to 5/2 Mbps". If that's fiber optic performance, I'll stick to my "up to 8 Mbps" cable connection, thank you very much.

They want to deliver Gigabyte IP video on 5/2 Mbps, is that what is said here?

[Mark Mende]

Huh?

"If they choose to block it, as some have accused almost all of the major US ISPs of doing, then their networks would become ghost networks, with virtually no traffic in sight."

This is certainly a silly statement. I work at a University, we block p2p access and we max out our bandwidth. Guess what? People use the Internet for other things!!!!

[Shabble]

Mainstream P2P = global warming?

To provide a single normal def TV channel to a household will require data streaming of, say 2Mbps. Add into that many households will want two or three seperate streams at the same time, that's 6Mbps absolute minimum bandwidth.

Now, I don't know what the current figures are, but I imagine this will be at least five times the current bandwidth capacity of the existing ISP server farms to houses with broadband. Considering the slowdown many users of high bandwidth services experience in the evening, I wouldn't be surprised if we didn't actually need a ten-fold increase. Also, we must remember that at the moment only arount 25% of households have broadband.

In other words, a (very) rough estimate suggests that to supply the UK with workable internet TV will require a forty fold increase in network capacity and ISP server farms. Add to this the huge increase in cpu cycles that will be required to sort the 'good' traffic from the 'bad' traffic and we can see that Internet TV is extremely bad for the environment.

If we are to take global warming seriously, then we need to look at limiting the growth in our overall power consumption until renewable power has replaced carbon energy. Internet TV is a good example of a technology that we really don't need at the moment, and so should be held back. Or even better, the government should pass legislation requiring all P2P traffic to be powered by renewable energy - that would certainly provide some serious investment into green technologies!

p.s. Hey, El Reg. How about an Annoying Environmentalist icon to add to messages?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah right..

When you make the API and expect the user-side application to behave, you know what you're calling for... surprise, surpise, the applicaton will ABUSE it! This is a pipe dream..

[Al Jones]

"Blazin-fast internet access at up to 5/2 Mbps speeds"

5/2Mbps is the basic service for FiOS - you can get 15/2 or 15/15 too. I believe some areas get 30/10 as an option too. And in my experience, 5Mbps on FiOS means 5Mbps - which definitely isn't the case on cable.

[laird popkin]

P4P is a win-win

Anonymous Coward posts "When you make the API and expect the user-side application to behave, you know what you're calling for... surprise, surpise, the applicaton will ABUSE it! This is a pipe dream..."

The nice thing about P4P is that localizing network traffic is a win-win for both the ISP and the P2P network, so both have a strong incentive to work together.

To illustrate, the test that Pando Networks and Yale ran on Verizon and Telefonica's networks showed that:

- Knowledge of the ISP infrastructure allowed the P2P network to localize network traffic. For example, using random peer assignment,

- Downloading from people near you is much faster than downloading from people at random locations. So P4P downloads were on average 205% faster than P2P downloads.

- Transfers between ISP's dropped by over 50%, meaning that ISP's saved money on external transit (which are a major cost for ISP's), because that data was delivered within the ISP instead.

- Transfers within the ISP were also localized, reduced long distance transit consumption within the ISP network. P2P downloads traversed an average of 5.5 long distance links (e.g. city to city) to get from the seed to the downloader. With P4P, transfers averaged 0.9 long distance links (i.e. consuming much less of the network). To look at it another way, with "random peer" P2P, only 6% of data downloaded within the ISP was from your own metro area. With P4P, that number was a whopping 58%.

Because this is a win-win situation, there's no "abuse", in that nobody "loses" if the other side does too much P4P.

There's more information about P4P at http://www.pandonetworks.com/p4p , and the P4P Working Group at http://www.dcia.info/activities#p4p .

- Laird Popkin, Co-Chair, P4P Working Group (and CTO, Pando Networks)

[Anonymous Coward]

do not want this either

If I wanted F-ing TV on computer or cell phone I would purchase a tuner card for my computer or purchase a cellular capable of receiving it. But no, they want to slow everything else down by adding more shit to the backbone that some of us don't want.

[Morely Dotes]

@ J re: FIOS

"up to 5 Mbps" is the *cheapest* FIOS service. I get 15 Mbps down and 2 Mbps up, and actual measurements consistently show 14.7 Mbps down (or better).

Keep in mind that the cheap service is meant to compete with DSL; Comcast users are paying more than double the price of the cheap stuff on FIOS.

Mind you, I hate Verizon, but they have treated me better than Comcast ever did, and their technical support is based in the USA, with native American English speakers who are willing to escalate a call if they can't help you quickly.

I *never* got that from Comcast.

[IMVHO]

Nip n' tuck shaping.

I agree that this will become a feature. To make it an enhancement, you first have to create a need. In some parts, simply use P2P throttling as a stick to beat your end-users, and even your competition (especially if said competition leases from you, due to government legislation).

In Canada, Bell (biggest telco) isn't just shaping P2P traffic of it's own end-users, it's now doing the same to traffic of an ISP which leases from Bell. How long will it be until a "feature" like that proposed by Verizon becomes something that has a price tag? Hmmm... P2P, VPN, we'll shape that in a way that will be nice for you, so long as you pay. The alternative? We'll throttle it down to a crawl. Alternative ISP? No, so sorry, they don't offer the feature of relief from our throttling, and we really don't care to route their traffic through quiet patches of our network.

I know that that's not a new thought; but it's especially frustrating when a major ISP uses this type of tactic to hammer a minor competitor. In some markets, end-users can, with relative ease, flip their ISP the bird and head on over to a more agreeable provider. That's not so easy for a small ISP to pull-off.