P4P could help solve Canada’s traffic shaping debate

Results of a recent trial south of the border have shown that ISPs may be wrong in assuming that P2P technology is a threat to network bandwidth. Pando Networks Inc. and Verizon Communications Inc. tested proactive network provider participation for peer to peer, known as P4P, which demonstrated dramatic improvements to P2P download speeds. "P4P is a protocol that can help ISPs and P2P to work together," Haiyong Xie, a researcher at Yale University, tells Network Letter. The idea of P4P is for client applications to better assess network conditions, thus improving P2P file transfer performance. P4P does this by using the network topology so that peers can be selected more efficiently, as opposed to randomly, as presently occurs with P2P. "It should be stressed that P4P works with P2P, it doesn't replace it," adds Xie. "P4P is designed to better express network policies for more control over the network." In effect, P4Pwould allow legitimate P2P activity to be harnessed to improve service and make billing more efficient. As a result, though we rarely hear of ISPs being a fan of P2P technology, P4P may change all that. Certainly the Verizon results were impressive. Working with technology from Pando in the context of the P4P working group, which is overseen by the Distributed Computing Industry Association (DCIA), Verizon saw overall download performance improve 200%, with some instances showing a 600% increase. Marty Lafferty, CEO of the DCIA, sees the problem as cultural more than technological. "Content providers have been very slow to adopt P2P compared to other technologies," says Lafferty. "Remember industry resistance to the VCR? Now non-theatre releases amount to five times the revenue of theatrical distribution," he says, suggesting that P2P offers a similar opportunity. For Lafferty, the key is for carriers and content providers to get together on a business model that can leverage P2P and P4P. He gives the example of Canadian music distributor Nettwerk Productions, which is participating in the recently launched LimeWire store. "Per capita, Canada is the third largest user of P2P in the world," he says, suggesting the P4P could come to the aid of Canadian carriers. For some, this won't come soon enough. Bell Canada recently ran afoul of one of its wholesale customers, Ontario-based ISP TekSavvy, by shaping P2P activity. As well, the final episode of the CBC television show Canada's Next Great Prime Minister, which was available as a BitTorrent upload, was hard to access due to ISP-based P2P throttling. For more on this from Canadian New Media, click here. The notion that carriers and content providers must be against P2P is contradicted by membership in the P4P working group. The core group has 18 members, including unlikely bedfellows AT&T, Verizon, BitTorrent and LimeWire, and another 18 observers, among them big content providers like NBC Universal, Turner Broadcasting and Cox Communications. For Rafferty, the battle is essentially a waste of time. "P2P is truly decentralized," he says, "Even with massive litigation, open source software will still work, and it will continue to develop. But some senior executives got to where they are by being control freaks, and P2P is anathema to them." Robert Levitan, CEO of Pando Networks, tells Network Letter that there is more news on the way. "Soon we will be reporting on the Telefonica network, and after that others," he says. "Wait until you see some of the results on cable - this is part of the story that hasn't been told yet." Levitan claims that Pando has had conversations with national carriers in Canada, but "these were about P2P in general." That said, the DCIA's Rafferty informed NL that SaskTel is an observer of the P4P working group. Aside from Yale University and the University of Washington, most recently the University of Toronto has joined the working group, guided by Alberto Leon-Garcia, a full professor in the department of electrical and computer engineering. Leon-Garcia also sees carrier-class P2P research as more of an opportunity than a threat. "The P4P working group is helping to align applications with network infrastructure," he says. "There's a lot of uncertainty in the industry around new business models, but this isn't just about rogue applications, it's about how applications can be incorporated into a service provider's infrastructure." According to Leon-Garcia, the challenge is to get file sharing networks such as Gnutella to run with trackers. This is part of the fundamental research problem facing torrents, in that the overlays do not integrate with the underlying ISP networks. "This can lead to inefficiencies with how you use the infrastructure, but P4P is showing big gains in how you can align with underlying traffic."

P4P could help solve Canada’s traffic shaping debate

News | March 31, 2008

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