By , OnlineVideoWatch
Mar 18, 2008

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So said Pando Networks CEO Robert Levitan speaking of the collaboration between Pando, Yale researchers and Verizon at the DCIA’s Inaugural Market Conference in New York.

P2P has come a long way since the Napster days. Progress shown by the fact that telcos are now engaging with P2P companies for the mutual benefit of users and business. The need for collaboration was a recurring theme of the conference. Said Eliot Listman of PeerApp:

People think the bandwidth is free…a service provider is providing the bandwidth, content owners are starting to deploy peer-to-peer, however those content owners are now concerned [because the] service provider could block it. All this politics and [talk of] regulation brings to the front that it’s a business relationship that has to grow.

Which is what the P4P Working Group is all about. Back in June of last year, I attended the first New York P2P 2.0 Meetup, organized by Laird Popkin, CTO of Pando Networks and attended by Verizon Senior Technologist Doug Paskin, in which Yale PhD student Haiyong Xie presented his research on the benefit of “Proactive Provider Assistance for P2P.”

The P4P Working Group grew out of the ensuing discussion, a collaboration between ISPs, P2P providers and Technology Researchers to “accelerate distribution of content…and optimize ISP Network resources…to provide the best possible performance to end-user customers.”

Janko Roettgers at NewTeeVee has more on the specifics of the technology, but the short story is that ISPs by implementing a mechanism through which they can communicate with P2P about network status and policies can ultimately benefit from customer use of P2P in a big way.

And the Verizon field trial results are compelling:

• P4P enhanced download rates for FTTH averaged 205% the speed of unmanaged P2P downloads.
• ISP internal data delivery (hop count) feel from and average of 5.5 hops to 0.89 hops.
• Traffic localization within metro locations increased from 6.27% for P2P to 57.98% for P4P enhanced delivery.
• Some FTTH users saw as much as 665% the download speed of unmanaged P2P.

Peer-to-Peer can be done legally, securely and for the mutual benefit of all parties. Thanks to the DCIA and a whole lot of smart people, we are headed toward more intelligent networks that will provide faster performance and a better experience to all users.