We had to read this twice to be certain, but Verizon is teaming up with researchers at Yale and a P4P Working group in order to speed up peer to peer file sharing. How is this beneficial to Verizon, which as a telco has the burden of carrying P2P traffic, which measures at about 1/3 of the internet’s throughput already? Because when you’re sharing files with others, only about 6.3% of the traffic comes from users in the same city as you, which is cheap traffic for Verizon to deliver. In a new optimised scheme, up to 58% of the traffic can come from nearby users, which speeds up your downloads and makes it much more cost effective for the ISP.
AT&T has also participated in tests like this one, but is trying to find a way to block pirated content and only allow “legal” content such as NBC’s officially delivered shows to make it through the network. Verizon, on the other hand, says they do “not accept the role of network police agency,” which means filtering for pirated content is unlikely. Yay! [Yahoo]
Laird Popkin
March 15, 2008 at 6:41 PM
This is a great article. I’d just like to add that participation in
the P4P Working Group is free and open to all ISP’s and P2P
companies and researchers. And, in particular, we would love to have participation from ISP’s in Australia, as you guys face some network challenges that are probably quite different from the situation in the US and Europe.
You can contact us for
more information:
Laird Popkin, laird@pando.com
Report PermalinkDoug Pasko, doug.pasko@verizon.com
Marty Lafferty, marty@dcia.info