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Researchers Suggest P2P As Solution To Video Domination of The Internet

Posted by Zonk on Sun Sep 16, 2007 04:21 AM
from the making-it-all-work dept.
The Internet Media
JPawlak writes "NewScientistTech reports that big businesses may be realizing the benefits of P2P technologies. Blizzard uses it to distribute patches for World of Warcraft, and now researchers at Microsoft are indicating internet users may have to use it to help distribute online video clips. The growing cost associated with delivering such content may be becoming prohibitive for some companies. 'The team also suggest a way to prevent Internet Service Providers' costs jumping when their users start uploading much more data. The trick is to allow sharing only between people with the same provider, when data transactions are free. That restriction would cut the pool of sharers into smaller groups, meaning MSN's servers would have to do more to fill any gaps in the service. But costs could still fall by more than half, simulations showed.'"
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Submission: Microsoft Seeks Help From P2P Users by JPawlak (664754)
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  • ISPs are gonna love this, since they're big fans of P2P as it is (Bittorrent and friends).

    • Re:haha oh wow (Score:4, Interesting)

      by arivanov (12034) on Sunday September 16 2007, @05:48AM (#20624103) Homepage
      Actually they will.

      Especially when someone points to the idiots from Redmondia (and other places) that they should stop reinventing multicast again and again. The technology to do what is needed is there, the ability of ISPs to control it so that it is not detrimental to other users is also there. It has been there since the dawn on the Internet. And it is Multicast. From the viewpoint of network design and network operation theory, P2P is nothing, but an extremely lame sorry and sad excuse for Multicast emulation.

      Implementing it is solely a matter of minor network tidy-up for most ISPs along with some software updates for the CE devices (where not supplied by the ISP).

      By the way, the same methods which are used to control multicast are also valid for P2P services. TTL adjustment down to under 8 will usually cut down the traffic to be solely within an ISP while cutting it down to under 4 will cut it down so it stays within the same RAS device (2 for non-NAT setups). It is also trivial to deliver a correct setting on a per-ISP basis and to autodetect the necessary setting adjustment.

      There is no rocket science here and no research to be done. All the tech is already out there. The problem is that the suppliers of P2P services and developers of P2P software deliberately do not want to do this. In fact, they are doing everything they can to steal more service than the ISP is willing to allocate to them. As a result the ISPs have no other choice but to love this and use a big stick to provide the luving to the customer.

      • Especially when someone points to the idiots from Redmondia (and other places) that they should stop reinventing multicast again and again.

        Multicast makes no sense here, no sense at all. Multicast makes sense when everyone wants to see the same data at exactly the same time (e.g. video conference). For sharing of video clips, this would actually waste a huge chunk of bandwidth.

        What you're proposing means the first person to watch the video gets to watch the video. Most someone wants to start watching it
        • For stuff like patches that doesnt matter.
          It would simply use a Bittorrent like system where the chunks can come from anywhere in the file.

        • Re:haha oh wow (Score:4, Insightful)

          by arivanov (12034) on Sunday September 16 2007, @09:08AM (#20625193) Homepage
          I probably did not express my thoughts clear enough. Let's give it another go.

          There are two portions to a P2P network - discovery and data fetch. Discovery determines where do you get your data from and fetch is the actual data flow. An ISP can confine a P2P service to its own network by either limiting discovery or by limiting the actual fetches.

          The discovery is where the P2P networks lamely emulate a multicast application. They try to determine if a piece of data A is present in any of the surrounding nodes B,C,D,E,F. In order to do that they in the trivial case transmit to each node. In the more modern networks they transmit to hypernodes and get info from there. In either case they try to emulate a multicast network via a tunnel mesh (just the way people try to emulate Multicast on ATM LANE).

          Compared to that a discovery mechanism based on multicast with a unicast reply can give you the information on where exactly is the piece which you are interested with one request. There is usually no need for hypernodes either. It just works. Magically. Further to this, you can set your discovery scope to find nodes which are 1,2,3...n hops away by tweaking TTL. Further to this, it is a true P2P network - totally serverless. If you throw in PKI authentication you can also make it as secure as you wish.
      • The reason people aren't using multicast is because it doesn't work: ISPs don't support it reliably, and even if it did, it's poorly designed and doesn't address the same needs as P2P.

        A better solution is for ISPs to cache P2P traffic, and that's what they are doing. That prevents the same packet from traversing the same link over and over again, without the limitations and design problems of multicast.
      • In fact, they are doing everything they can to steal more service than the ISP is willing to allocate to them. As a result the ISPs have no other choice but to love this and use a big stick to provide the luving to the customer.

        If my contract says I have unlimited bandwidth and I pay for the max speeds a provider provides, how am I stealing more service than the ISP is willing to allocate me? If they didn't want me to use the service I pay for, shouldn't they have not sold me the service in the first place.
        • Multicast is just another type of television.

          May I suggest dear Anonymous Coward that you get a clue. TV is where the multicast continues to fail due to a variety of reasons. Data delivery and p2p like applications are where it excels.

          The second biggest application for multicast is data delivery in financial networks. It does exactly what says on the tin - propagate the same data from point A to point B,C,D,E with minimal resource expenditure per link. Peer-to-Peer systems simulate this by retransmittin

    • Most ISP now like people to be on limited download limits per month, and charge for excess. If this takes off, the number of 'accidantal' overrtuns will potentially skyrocket, and profits will be up.

      I wouldn't be surprised if the unlimited tag is removed completely so they can be sure of cashing in on this.

      I'll happily use p2p if it fulfills four criteria

      1: It's legal.
      2: Its to my direct benefit (people who just leech being removed from the system).
      3: My ISP won't try to ass rape my bank account each month
      • From the ISP's point of view, in-network traffic is dirt cheap, its the cross-boarder traffic that is expensive. I think these guys are morons for not providing P2P clients that prefer in-network peers and not installing local proxies to cache as much http and ftp content as possible.
      • Demanding extra fees from a few people is a way to make money.

        Demanding extra fees from EVERYONE is a way to quickly go out of business.
  • Sharing among people on the same network is only going to be effective for popular data. Not to mention I have a feeling Comcast would still send tell you you are using too much bandwidth even if it is all coming from within their network.
    • Yeah, wait until ISPs realize they are shooting themselves in the foot by capping the speed at the modem. In reality they should cap the speed later on, where the the data hits the backbone. That way they can much more easily bottleneck the data and shift it around. Rather instantly adjust data rates, and moreover allow for the max speed the technology allows when you're dealing with internal data transfer. So if you are going P2P on Time Warner between different people with the same ISP, you can transfer d
      • I have gotten a letter once from comcast supposedly for violating some Digital Millenium Rights Act thing downloading movies illegally. So was this a comcast message in disguise that they don't want me using the bandwidth? What actually happens when you reach the cap? Do they email you a letter? Do they shut you down permanently or monthly?

  • P2P != BitTorrent (Score:3)

    by Asmor (775910) on Sunday September 16 2007, @04:36AM (#20623711) Homepage
    Saying BitTorrent (and similar protocols, if such exist) is P2P is like saying the web is the internet.

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by Chandon Seldon (43083)

      My favorite P2P protocal is the Internet Protocal. If ISPs are going to block P2P, they should start with that one. All the other ones rely on it anyway.

  • Really some of us have been saying it for a long time. Some of the load can be taken off the internet especially bulk files such as video and bt by sharing them first within the network and then outside. I think that's it's a fine idea if people are willing to do it, that way you only have to seed some of the file to people on similar networks. The only place I see this falling short really is with very specific files, for instance I doubt that me or any of my neighbors are going to be watching the same

  • Hmmm...I don't think so (Score:5, Interesting)

    by davmoo (63521) on Sunday September 16 2007, @04:44AM (#20623769)
    I have no problems at all with not for profit entities using some of my bandwidth to distribute their files.

    I have serious problems with a for profit entity like Microsoft or Redhat doing the same.

    The first one I call "charity" or "support". The second one I call "leaching", and its not far from "stealing".

    If you're a for profit company and you can't afford bandwidth, then you need to find a new line of work. Don't expect your customers to give you freebies unless you're giving them something *good* in return, and something you're not also giving to those who don't share bandwidth.
    • Well, Microsoft might make a deal with the ISP's so it's still them paying for the bandwidth cost but it'll be cheaper since it's distributed.

      Also I think it's implied that cost savings on bandwidth is meant to be converted into cheaper and or better services.
    • Would this not be regulated by the market? If you don't want to use the extra bandwidth, don't use the product/service.
    • I kinda like this idea, though, if for no other reason than it puts the focus back on consumer upstream bandwidth. Not much point using P2P when people are stuck with ridiculously asynchronous connections (ie. 10mb/512kb), so hopefully upstreams and downstreams will start to come closer together again.

      • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

        by ScrewMaster (602015)
        But it doesn't seem reasonable to dismiss the system yet, when it could benefit everyone.

        True, I suppose ... but then again, take a look at the caliber of the people running the show here in the United States. Largely it comes down to the Telcos and Comcast, and a few other big ISPs, none of whom are interested in anything but profit maximization. I guarantee you that if they find a way to reduce their costs using this or any other technology, they will simply pass the savings on to themselves and their
      • Great, so not only are we going to have a bazillion program trying to phone home for updates, we are also going to have 5 different BT clients all thinking they are being nice to your ADSL upstream.

        That can't go wrong can it?
  • Seriously, do these "researchers" even HAVE cable internet? Upstream is only user segregated to the head-end for bare copper technologies like DSL. Cable broadband is built on a tree network. Sure, you can build more nodes into the infrastructure to free up a bit more upstream within a single neighborhood, but eventually that upstream has to be combined with the upstream from all the other nodes. Eventually you just can't squeeze any more data into the upstream band and everything stalls. This is one of the
    • You've completely missed the point. Regardless of how the cable infrastructure is arranged within the ISPs own network - they get chared at the transit point. Traffic between their own customers does not transit to another network at any point and so it is free for them.
        • You're making the same mistake as the OP. "Free" versus nonfree traffic is not a question of capital costs. ISPs have to pay per packet that moves upstream and off their network (depending on their peering status). The question of building infrastructure is irrelevant. It is a cost that the ISP has to invest to be in business, and can be written off against whichever of their activities seems most appropriate. It is not a DIRECT cost of the traffic. But every packet that transits to a backbone has a DIRECT
  • Researcher rediscovers USENET.
  • AFAIK p2p is the current solution to efficient video distribution. I think they are really trying to accomplish something else here, which is why the current solution won't do.

    For instance, if you want to distribute that World of Warcraft patch, then make a torrent and post it to a tracker, done. If you're really paranoid then host it on your own tracker. No, because what they really want is to have an service running on your machine 24/7, so they can... I don't know, but whatever is I'm pretty sure I wo
    • P2P works well for video right now, but as traffic increases, the bandwidth needs to be paid for. Expect the infrastructure needed to cost serious money to the ISP's, who don't want to spend the money for it without getting paid directly.

      P2P doesn't work well for DRM, for preventing people from accessing material without formal permission from the owner. This is the big problem for video content providers: the tools haven't been properly made or widely published to authenticate and restrict P2P content, so

  • The idea is great, but... (Score:4, Interesting)

    by FooBarWidget (556006) on Sunday September 16 2007, @05:10AM (#20623921)
    ...how do you implement it? Browsers currently have absolutely no support for implementing anything like this. I'm not sure whether it can be done in Flash. Java is so heavyweight that it would probably scare off most people. ActiveX is a no-go. You can't make people install client software either - 99% will never bother to do that. Unless you can make it work out-of-the-box on browsers, it'll not become popular.

    And how do you implement P2P streaming? All P2P protocols until now allow peers to send file pieces in non-streamable order.
    • Oh and I forgot to ask this as well: how do you get around firewalls/NAT? Most people these days are behind NAT. In my experience, UPnP only works out-of-the-box on very few systems because most routers have UPnP disabled by default.

      • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

        by Osty (16825)

        Oh and I forgot to ask this as well: how do you get around firewalls/NAT? Most people these days are behind NAT. In my experience, UPnP only works out-of-the-box on very few systems because most routers have UPnP disabled by default.

        Support linux-igd [sourceforge.net]? The project started back up in the past year and a half or so, along with libupnp [sourceforge.net] coming back from the dead after Intel abandoned it. Help these projects get to the point where they're trivial to setup, stable, and shipped with all distributions and you sol

    • Browsers currently have absolutely no support for implementing anything like this.
      Except for Opera, which is about the only program you actually need to interface with the entire web.

      About the only thing it's not useful for is SSH and FTP.
      • Uhm, what are you talking about? How do you want to run a new, yet-to-be-developed P2P protocol in a current version of Opera without installing software?
  • The article makes an assumption that data flow within an ISPs network is free. That is not always the case. Take for example an ADSL connection. The ADSL infrastructure (metallic path, DSLAM, etc.) is often (especially in the case of non-unbundled local loops) provided by a different company from the ISP. The ISP pays this provider per byte of data that flows over the connection to and from the end user.
    • Who gets stung with a deal like that? The UK is considered to be an example of what can go wrong with non-unbundled services, but even here ISPs paid a flat rental fee for access to the line, and then had to deal with BT for upstream access. Most the of the current bandwidth limits here are a direct result of how BT charges for that upstream bandwidth. Something like this system would be a great boon for them.

  • Support Microsoft! (Score:4, Funny)

    by haakondahl (893488) on Sunday September 16 2007, @05:24AM (#20623977)
    Download a P2P client and learn how to use it *today*. Help Apple! Share all of your files; learn how to become a seed. Lend the RIAA a hand--do their R&D for a new distribution model.

    There is a term in Low German for the feeling I have right now--SchadenGoFuchyourselves.

  • The trick is to allow sharing only between people with the same provider, when data transactions are free.

    Sounds like multicasting . . . good things the ISPs have implemented this also . . . oh wait.
    • It sounds nothing like multicasting. One is limiting peers based on their address ranges, and the other is broadcasting to multiple peers at once. Now, if multicasting did work properly it would revolutionise p2p as it would break the limit (total_upload=total_download) across the swarm.
  • Nerd: I've developed a program that downloads porn from the interet a million times faster than normal

    Marge: Who would need that much porn

    Homer: [drools]...oohhh..1 million times faster..
  • I'm sorry, but even if I send data to a neighbor I get that transfer charged on my 35GB monthly allowance. And that's 35GB for the upload+download total, too.

    Companies using P2P to distribute THEIR files (i.e. WoW being a perfect example) are cutting into MY 35GB for the month. And if you try to block them out, you get ridiculously slow downloads, around 0.1KB/sec.

    Screw'em all.

  • Unrestricted P2P across a true mesh topology is developmentally speaking, the ultimate logical destination for the Internet, in my own mind. If I was going to borrow an expression from someone the average Slashbot considers one of their patron deities, I'd even call it a "historical inevitability."

    It's probably going to take a very long time. The telcos and big media can be counted on to fight it, kicking and screaming, every last milimeter of the way. Eventually however, if the net is to continue to exi
  • Consumers do a lot that is good for business, that business doesn't have to pay for but have been complaining about.
    P2P, genuinely fair use copyright (Some recent /. article on how fair use does a lot of good at stimulating teh economy....and even matters regarding the fraud of software patents (IBM the largest software Patent Holder have been releasing their patents to open source and others are beginning to follow.)

    There was a time in this country (USA) where the people got together and created the countr
  • Since multicast keeps getting mentioned and as I imagine there are a few who are too lazy to Wikipedia it. Here is the gist of it:

    IP Multicast is a technique for many-to-many communication over an IP infrastructure. It scales to a larger receiver population by not requiring prior knowledge of who or how many receivers there are. Multicast utilizes network infrastructure efficiently by requiring the source to send a packet only once, even if it needs to be delivered to a large number of receivers. The nodes

  • Microsoft invents Democracy Player and Joost, only a few years after they have been invented!
  • The best solution for this problem is to provide for a true market solution for both the producers and the users. I've been researching and writing about peercasting for years now, and I do think this is a great solution to the problem.

    First of all, if the content is free, then someone wants that content watched. If that original producer is willing to put a price on the cost of a complete download, those who are helping to provide bandwidth for that download should get offered a piece of the action. If
    • I've used bittorrent effectively inside a corporate firewall for transmitting DVD images, especially because HTTP and FTP couldn't handle files larger than 2 Gigabyte easily. The security models aren't built in: authentication of the content remains a separate step. But transmitting DRM enabled files, such as Windows Media files for the BBC's well-publicized Iplayer project, seems a natural approach and would help prevent fakery of the files. (That's a big problem for PiratesBay and other Bittorrent sites.)
      • Bittorrent does have authentication of content built in. One of the big advantages over FTP and HTTP btw. When I have recieved something via bittorrent, I am guaranteed to have recieved exactly what the publisher of the torrent file wanted me to recieve, and nothing else. As long as you trust the publisher of the original torrent file, you can trust the data your recieve.

        Of course, if you use sites like the piratebay, you can't trust the publisher (because anyone can publish), so you can't be sure if what y
    • What's missing is a protocol to determine where your ISP's borders are and sticking to peers within those borders. Essentially what you have are P2P supernodes (after a fashion) at each major ISP (Akamai already does this for normal HTTP traffic, after all) and they're the only hosts that actually establish connections outside of the ISP's network.

      You could do it with BitTorrent--in a controlled situation--by serving different .torrents to users of different ISPs, and making the supernode a tracker as well

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