P2P is Only Part of the Bandwidth Solution
Current Internet bandwidth growth is just a bump in the impending video explosion The current growth has been driven by P2P and web video such as from YouTube. But it's nothing compared to what happens when full TV channels are streamed down the pipe. And then again for HDTV.
Robert Cringely's article includes a paper by William Norton of Equinix that projects video distribution costs. The results for a 1.5 GB movie:
$0.20 for a central server
$0.24 for edge-caching CDN like Akamai
$0.17 for custom CDN
$0.0018 for P2P
Game over? Not quite yet. P2P is only part of the solution. There are significant issues that need to be resolved. One is bandwidth cost. I'm not as alarmist as the ISPs. They're huge telcos that can and will price their services and get regulatory relief as needed. They even can be innovative and competitive if forced to do so.
Another issue is traffic congestion. Cringely writes about future solutions from the Googleplex to NuMetra technology that turbocharges the TCP/IP stack.
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