I’ve long  had the suspicion that the heartburn AT&T and the cable guys get from P2P is more about getting paid more for content delivery and avoiding the necessary investment in infrastructure to accommodate users demands. The fact is ISP revenue is up and the cost of capacity is in free fall. This makes providing more capacity at current prices levels very profitable, just not as profitable as raising prices without making new investments.

In the connected world, bandwidth capacity must continuously increase. At the same time we must find ways to do more with less. Anyone within minimal understanding of technology can look at P2P vs server to client content delivery will discover that P2P is an exponentially more efficient way of delivering a large file or stream. That takes us back to the debate about getting paid more to deliver content and avoiding new investment, which seems to be what the cable guys and the death star are really interested in.

Mark Wegleitner, Verizon’s senior vice president of technology agrees with me on the efficiency of P2P:

Peer-to-peer is a distribution enabler. But often when people talk about P2P, it gets lumped into a category with things that are bad, mainly because it takes up so much capacity on the network. But whether it’s a good thing or a bad thing, there is underlying technology for P2P that can be used to everyone’s advantage to get content like video, which everyone is asking for, distributed in the most efficient way.

We conducted some tests with the P4P group and Yale University, and showed that customers have a better experience, and we use fewer resources, when we used the P2P technology. It’s really a win-win situation for us and the customer.(Cnet)

In what has to be the most galling of lies, Comcast has been caught again. But first lets set the stage for why. Comcast in a informational filing before the Commission made the statement that they only block P2P traffic when conditions warrant the necessity –

As described in detail below, Comcast manages the use of certain P2P protocols in a
minimally intrusive way, and only when necessary, based on purely objective criteria; these management techniques are not based on the content of the files users are sharing or the identity of the users who are doing the sharing. More specifically, Comcast’s network management practices (1) only affect the protocols that have a demonstrated history of generating excessive burdens on the network; (2) only manage those protocols during periods of heavy network traffic; (3) only manage uploads; (4) only manage uploads when the customer is not simultaneously downloading (i.e., when the customer’s computer is most likely unattended) (“unidirectional sessions” or “unidirectional uploads”); and (5) only delay those protocols until such time as usage drops below an established threshold of simultaneous unidirectional sessions. These network management practices are fully consistent with the Internet Policy Statement.

Comcast is asserting that they do this on an as needed basis. But hold on a moment. Germany’s equivalent of MIT, Max Planck Institute conducted a study in may that both Cox and Comcast blocked P2P traffic at all hours generally without let up. –

The Max Planck Institute collected data between March 18 and May 15 from 8,175 unique hosts that ran its BitTorrent tests. Participating hosts were in 90 countries, connected through 1,224 ISPs, and ran the ‘Glasnost’ testing tool.

The only locations where cable ISPs blocked BitTorrent traffic to a significant extent were in the United States (Comcast and Cox) and Singapore (Starhub).

Tests showed that Comcast blocked at least 30 per cent of BitTorrent upload attempts and, during most hours, Comcast blocked between 50 to 80 percent of BitTorrent traffic. Cox blocked at least 20 per cent of BitTorrent uploads (except for one period at 3 AM where one request wasn’t blocked) and, during most hours, Cox blocked between 50 to 100 per cent of all BitTorrent traffic.

Puts the lie to their Commission filing. Personally, if Comcast wants to manage traffic it would be fine with me provided there were alternatives for customers. Sadly in many locations that is not the case. You have Comcast for broadband or dialup. But what should not stand is the Commission doing nothing. Comcast committed the equivalent of perjury and in my view they ought to be slapped with a $10m fine because of their duplicity.

The twist on the old saw — “The omission was more costly than the crime.”, comes to mind.

Linky.

What’s this? After telling us the P2P traffic is the arch nemesis of all things good on their network, Comcast investing in a P2P video delivery network.

Seattle-based GridNetworks on Monday said that Comcast would make an unspecified investment in the company and collaborate on developing so-called peer-to-peer file-sharing techniques that are “friendly” to Internet service providers.

Comcast, the country’s second largest Internet service provider, hampers some file-sharing traffic by its subscribers in an attempt to keep the traffic from slowing down Web surfing by other subscribers. Complaints by consumer groups and legal scholars that the company is discriminating against particular software have led to an investigation by the Federal Communications Commission.

Comcast has said that it will stop targeting specific types of traffic by the end of the year. It has also reached out to file-sharing companies to try to develop mutually acceptable techniques. (Yahoo)

The more conspiracy minded may think Comcast is buying in to collect more useful data on new ways to meddle with P2P traffic. I think the scenario that is closer reality is someone in the tech dept has convinced the suits that P2P is likely to be the most efficient way to do IPTV for themselves. Perhaps they could be even more forward thinking to understand doing TVoIP to any network (not just their own) may be the real path to growth for any content provider. Naw, maybe they are not quite that smart. One thing for sure, mixed signals that continue to come out of this company show a real disconnect between technology and operations .

Yes folks were talking the Tanya Anderson case. The one where RIAA accused her of downloading files even though she does not have sharing software loaded and their own expert testified that she had not done so. The outcome is that the RIAA must pay $108,000 in legal fees so far. The class action suit, a seperate action, is still pending. But it ain’t looking good for the RIAA right now in regards to Anderson.

An Oregon federal magistrate has awarded nearly $108,000 to a Beaverton single mother who said the recording industry falsely accused her of illegally downloading music.

The money represents Tanya Andersen’s attorney fees and costs in successfully fighting a lawsuit filed by the recording industry against her.

The attorney fee award is separate from a national class action lawsuit Andersen filed against the recording industry last year.

RIAA’s biggest problem is that once they lose one case they will start losing many. The first winning case becomes a template to all further defense actions.

Well there is a new P2P in town — Alliance. Has all the usual attributes of a P2P. But it does not stop there. First, it does not indiscriminately look for traffic partners. Those are set up by the Alliance participants. Sort of like a ‘Friends and Family Plan’ P2P. The second is the data packets are encased in SSL.

So why should Comcast be upset? Well the schema has been that they would look for patterns in the network data streams. If they found a candidate they would do a deep packet analysis to ascertain if a Torrent or P2P was occurring. Well that will be very hard to do if the underlying data packets are encrypted in a SSL layer. Best they will be able to do is monitor usage then do a simple block on the traffic rather than the usual packet reshaping to cause the traffic to cease. Its just more headache.

What makes this tough for the RIAA is that unlike normal P2P; Alliance requires that you be invited to join an existing Alliance network. So if 6 kids are off ripping CD’s [and ‘The Man’] unless one of the members of the network is crazy enough to invite an unknown to the network how are they going to know?

Alliance has versions for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux. I can see quite a few uses for this type of P2P in the corporate world. Ad Hoc teams can pull together shares for projects without the hassle of waiting for IT. With AES-SSL encryption the teams can be in remote locations and not worry too much about loss of the data over the wire. A novel solution with commendable features.

We’ve long held the belief that the duopoly’s problem with P2P has never been about taking the moral high road and protecting copyright holders. Rather it’s been about constraining the use of bandwidth with copyright infringement a paper tiger. With the explosive growth of legit P2P, we’re bettting the tune they are singning will have to change:

A number of startups are embracing so-called peer-to-peer technology and have convinced some big-name media companies to use them to deliver legal content.

“In 2005 when we met with content owners, ‘peer-to-peer’ was a dirty word,” said Robert Levitan, chief executive of file-sharing company Pando Networks Inc. “In 2007, finally, content owners came and said ‘Yeah, we think there’s a role for P2P.’”

Levitan was speaking Friday at the first “P2P Market Conference” of the Distributed Computing Industry Association, a trade group with more than 100 members.

Pando is prime example of mainstream acceptance: It’s providing the means for NBC to provide DVD-quality downloads of its shows, including “The Tonight Show” with Jay Leno. (Yahoo News)

Verizon seems to be interested in supporting a new P2P protocol called P4P. It promises to move more data with less strain on the network. I’m betting that V is taking a hard look at using it for their own content distribution. I’m all for that as long as they give non Verizon content equal treatment. As a side benefit, it would add a fun new twist to the Comcast net management debate.

P4P, which stands for Proactive network Provider Participation for P2P, ultimately aims to decrease backbone traffic and bring down network operation costs by enabling service providers to communicate information about network conditions to client applications for the purpose of facilitating improved P2P file transfer performance. Instead of selecting peers at random, the P4P protocol leverages network topology data so that peers can be selected in a manner that increases routing efficiency.

Ars spoke with Verizon senior technologist and P4P workgroup co-chair Doug Pasko, who tells us that Verizon observed download performance improvements of approximately 200 percent during tests conducted with Pando. The performance boost can climb as high as 600 percent in some cases. Verizon believes that P2P technology is moving into the mainstream and is being legitimized for large-scale commercial content delivery. The company sees P4P as a way to enable broader commercial adoption of P2P tech while unclogging the tubes and relieving network congestion.

Since the efficacy of the P4P protocol largely relies on the availability of network topology information, Verizon and the P4P workgroup aim to make the new protocol an industrywide standard and convince other carriers to share their own data and participate. “Quite frankly, any carrier should benefit from this,” Pasko told Ars. The initiative has drawn support from a number of ISPs, including Comcast, which is currently facing scrutiny for impeding peer-to-peer traffic on its own network. (from Ars Technica)