North American Network Operators Group
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Re: Network end users to pull down 2 gigabytes a day, continuously?

  • From: Patrick W. Gilmore
  • Date: Sun Jan 07 11:14:03 2007

On Jan 7, 2007, at 3:17 PM, Brandon Butterworth wrote:

The real problem with P2P networks is that they don't
generally make download decisions based on network
architecture.


Indeed, that's what I said. Until then ISPs can only fix it with P2P
aware caches, if the protocols did it then they wouldn't need the
caches though P2P efficiency may go down

It'll be interesting to see how Akamai & co. counter this trend. At the
moment they can say it's better to use a local Akamai cluster than have
P2P taking content from anywhere on the planet. Once it's mostly local
traffic then it's pretty much equivalent to Akamai. It's still moving
routing/TE up the stack though so will affect the ISPs network ops.

ISPs don't pay Akamai, content owners do.

Content owners are usually not concerned with the same things an ISP's "newtork ops" are. (I'm not saying that's a good thing, I'm just saying that is reality. Life might be much better all around if the two groups interacted more. Although one could say that Akamai fills that gap as well. :)

Anyway, a content provider is going to do what's best for their content, not what's best for the ISP. It's a difficult argument to make to a content provider that putting their content on millions of end user HDs depending on grandma to provide good quality streaming to Joe Smith down the street. At least in my experience.

--
TTFN,
patrick