sorted by: recent | see :
popular
Content Tagged p2p
weiwei's study
a blog that is maintained by a Chinese Ph.D. candidate from Beihang University, Beijing, P.R.China.
The content is about: Wireless Sensor Network(WSN),Network Simulation/Emulation/Testbed(TinyOS,NS2,TOSSIM,OPNET,Glomosim),Wireless Research(WSN,WiFi,Mesh),OpenSource(JTrana,ZhuaShuShell,QReadBook).
qt
802.15.4
NS-2
adhoc
TinyOS
ad-hoc
p2p
Web2.0
network
opnet
Shocking: New Facts About P2P and Broadband Usage
Not a day goes by without someone bemoaning the evils of peer-to-peer networking, painting visions of a network apocalypse brought on by pimply-faced file stealers. And to make their case, naysayers typically present some hard-to-argue-with stats. This week, however, we came across a set of numbers that show more traditional video sources (streaming and flash video, for example) are now an increasing component of bandwidth on consumer-focused broadband networks.
As part of the research I’m doing for another piece, I had a long conversation with Danny McPherson, CTO of Arbor Networks, which makes all sorts of network-management and traffic-shaping tools. Arbor is used by dozens of ISPs around the planet and, as a result, McPherson is privy to details about traffic flows and usage patterns across many broadband networks.
McPherson shared with me some interesting stats and facts about broadband usage and peer-to-peer networking usage patterns. Given that Arbor makes a living selling its technology and products to carriers, it is prudent to maintain a degree of skepticism about the numbers. That said, they are nevertheless interesting enough to share.
On fixed and mobile broadband networks where consumer services are provided (i.e., NOT interprovider or typical dedicated Internet access for commercial enterprises):
- 10 percent of subscribers consume 80 percent of bandwidth.
- 0.5 percent of subscribers consume about 40 percent of total bandwidth
- 80 percent of subscribers use less than 10 percent of bandwidth
This supports the arguments made by some of the larger ISPs, including Comcast. In a recent interview, Comcast Cable CTO Tony Werner told me his company would try and deal with the tiny number of subscribers who use most of the bandwidth by slowing down their connections during peak times. (Personally, I find that to be a distasteful solution, and I believe that folks should learn from newer ISPs like Free.fr and better architect their networks so they can provide more bandwidth for all — without imposing any penalties.)
The P2P stats are the ones that came as a complete surprise. Like you, I have read many reports that suggest P2P applications account for the majority of the traffic on high-speed networks. But McPherson???s data suggests otherwise:
- 20 percent of traffic is P2P applications
- During peak-load times, 70 percent of subscribers use http while 20 percent are using P2P
- Http still makes up the majority of the total traffic, of which 45 percent is traditional web content that includes text and images. Streaming video and audio content from services like YouTube accounts for nearly 50 percent of the http traffic. It shouldn???t come as a surprise to anyone — streaming TV shows from Hulu and videos from YouTube have been on a major upswing, as noted by our colleagues over on NewTeeVee.
So, what do you make of these numbers?
The GNU Privacy Guard - GnuPG.org
OFFSYSTEM: Owner Free File System
open-source: del.icio.us tag/open-source
p2p
tools
open-source
open_source
networks
format:site
system:has:format
Lessig Lectures the FCC on the Need for Neutrality
Now we know why none of the major carriers showed up for Thursday’s open FCC meeting at Stanford University: Who wants to take on Larry Lessig, the lion of Net Neutrality, in his own den?
Class was in session when Stanford law prof Lessig delivered a powerful lecture on the need for neutral networks, telling the assembled FCC chairman and commissioners to their faces that they were part of a 10-year-long failure by the agency to “make a clear statement of policy” about how infractions against the open, end-to-end connectivity of the Internet would be policed or enforced.
Lessig’s key points — which included the assertion that the historic openness of the Internet has been the key to its economic boom — are important to record, since they are very likely to become key talking points for Net Neutrality proponents as the battle over potential neutrality regulation heats up during the current congressional session. But the lack of a viable opponent in the arena made for a somewhat lukewarm event, with more than half the auditorium’s reported 716 seats going empty. Those who were present cheered mightily for Lessig, while only issuing soft “boos” for Republican FCC commissioners Robert McDowell and Deborah Tate, whose brief remarks basically indicated their opposition to any Net Neutrality regulations.
Unlike the other assembled panelists, who had just a few minutes to present their specific-interest cases, Lessig was given all the time he needed to make a strong case for the need for clear network neutrality policies, either from the FCC or Congress. Two of his stronger points, which you can expect to see repeated, were one, that Net Neutrality principles have been the historic base of the Internet, and have been responsible for its unbridled competition and growth. And two, that providers should be governed by clear rules that make it more expensive for them to restrict network access than to provide broadband that doesn’t differentiate or prioritize different traffic types.
The FCC, Lessig said, should pass rules that make it more profitable for service providers to behave than to misbehave. “You have to make it so playing the games is not a good business model for them,” Lessig said. “If we really didn’t have a reason to worry that they were playing games [with network management], then what they did inside their networks would be of less concern.”
Though invited by FCC chairman Kevin Martin, all the major Internet service providers — AT&T, Verizon, Comcast and Time Warner Cable, among others — declined to participate in Thursday’s open meeting. Comcast, which waded into a debacle on several levels at the last such open meeting at Harvard, was slammed by several panelists Thursday, including by Robb Topolski, who is credited as being one of the first to detect Comcast’s disputed P2P blocking activities.
Comcast’s activities, Topolski said, “are non-standard, and not accepted by the industry.” And Jon Peha, a computer engineering professor at Carnegie Mellon, disputed Comcast’s claims that it wasn’t “blocking” traffic, part of an seemingly unsolved question that Lessig said was at the heart of the problem.
“The most outrageous thing is that [the FCC] can’t get the facts straight,” Lessig said with regards to the Comcast controversy, expressing wonderment that a government body like the FCC was still somewhat in the dark about what Comcast was or wasn’t doing. “The least we should be able to do is get the truth about what is happening,” Lessig said.
Watch the entire session on video.
Paul Kapustka, former managing editor for GigaOM, now has his own blog at Sidecut Reports.
Comcast to Create P2P Bill of Rights
Comcast said today it plans to create a “P2P Bill of Rights and Responsibilities” in cooperation with P2P companies and other ISPs. The bill is supposed to be a catalog of best-practice recommendations for P2P companies and ISPs alike, but the announcement was more than vague about what those recommendations might look like. NewTeeVee has the full story.
Joost CEO On US & Global Plans, Cutbacks
Mike Volpi, CEO of Joost, spent his first weekend in California in many months dealing with the blowback from a story in The Sunday Times (of UK) that has the company scaling back its global ambitions in favor of a US-only focus. We talked earlier this evening, and Volpi said none of those things are actually true. (PaidContent had talked to Joost spokesperson earlier today.)
“We are focusing on US, Western Europe, China and a few other Asian markets,” he told me. “Taking a more measured approach to our expansion, and keeping it in sync with markets where online advertising is mature enough.” Volpi pointed out that Joost launched in China two weeks ago, and has recently signed content partnerships in Scandinavia. When you add to the mix UK, France and a couple of other Western European countries, Volpi said it is pretty obvious that the company is not scaling back from its global ambitions.
“What we are not doing is chasing every market, because as a start-up we need to be focused,” Volpi added. Due to its heritage - it was started by Skype co-founders Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis - Joost had received a lot of press coverage. God knows, I wrote about them a few times. The fact that it is run by Volpi, a highly regarded former Cisco executive and funded by the likes of uber VC funds Sequoia Capital and Index Ventures, it is hardly a surprise that Joost is being closely scrutinized. The company raised about $45 million in May 2007.
Joost was supposed to be the delivery vehicle for Hollywood content in the US. Instead, Hulu, a web-based video company backed by major networks chose its thunder and market, leaving Joost scrambling to play catch up. It has Viacom and CBS as its primary US partners, and it clearly needs to sign-up more A-list type content providers. Furthermore, the BBC’s iPlayer (where the former Joost CTO currently works), Kangaroo and other players are beginning to challenge Joost on its turf in Europe as well.
That said, the company doesn’t have much room for error. It needs to quickly improve its client and platform. Joost client has been subject of much criticism. Volpi knows that. He said that Joost is going to announce a new web-based platform in a few months. (We offered them 5 ways they can get out of trouble. Anil Gupte had listed 7 reasons they could be in trouble.)
When I asked Volpi about layoffs, he said that company realigned its work force. A few people were let go recently, as I first reported for NewTeeVee. Many contractors were cut as well.
As a result Joost of today is a trimmer version of its former self, thanks to pruning by Volpi, who became Joost CEO in May 2007. Some of these details were outlined in a Portfolio article. I tried to pin down Volpi on the total number of employees the company currently has, but he would not comment.
Rafat in his report says that Joost has about 100 employees. By that yardstick and my own not-quite-confirmed-data, that’s a head count reduction of around 35 to 40. Volpi said that the company is adding more “engineering” folks in their New York office and contrary to published reports has no plans to shut down the Netherlands operation.
Photo by Joey Wan.
March Madness Live On Joost
Peer-to-peer TV start-up Joost will make live-streaming video available to all its users tomorrow; it has also scored a deal with its investor CBS to live stream March Madness. A new client should be ready for download by about noon ET on Wednesday, reports NewTeeVee.
AllPeers: Lessons Learned
Although AllPeers didn’t produce the kind of outcome that we had hoped for and expected, it’s been a tremendous learning experience. Hopefully others will be able to benefit from what I consider to be the main lessons.
Luck and ambition
Naturally the success of any startup is dependent to some degree on luck, and the luck factor rises in proportion to your ambitions. If your plan is to sell T-shirts online then execution is probably the main consideration. If you make really cool designs, have an easy-to-use website and do good marketing then you’ll probably make money, though you’re unlikely to be buying a private island in the South Pacific any time soon. If, on the other hand, you plan to dethrone Facebook by adding state-of-the-art social features to the fabric of the web, transforming the internet experience of billions of people, you’re going to have to execute to perfection and still get really really lucky if your company is to succeed. Of course, if you make it you’ll be assured a very comfortable early retirement.
Neither of these approaches is inherently wrong but you should be aware of what you’re getting yourself into. If you can’t stand the thought of failure, make sure you’re not tackling a problem that is too big and ambitious. In the case of AllPeers, we knew that there was going to be a lot of luck involved (as there is with any product that relies on network effects and viral adoption), and we were pretty well prepared for the challenges we would face. It is comforting to see failure in this way because we certainly wouldn’t have sacrificed our lofty ambitions to increase our chance of moderate success.
Raise as much as you can
I’m not the first one to say this, but let me express my wholehearted agreement: raise as much as you can, as soon as you can, and not a penny less. In early 2006, before we had released even a private alpha of AllPeers, we suddenly became a minor web star thanks to a couple of white-hot buzzwords (”Firefox” and “BitTorrent”) and a very positive writeup on TechCrunch. (And in fact we owe a great deal to Mike Arrington, who grasped our vision immediately and did a great job of articulating why it was exciting. It’s easy and intellectually lazy to be pessimistic before the fact and snarky afterwards, while it takes courage to go out on a limb and predict success.) We believed our own hype a bit too much, unfortunately, and didn’t take advantage of the opportunity to raise a lot of cash at a high valuation. Instead we brought in a very modest amount under the assumption that we’d be in a great position in a few short months to close a much bigger round.
As a result, we were under constant pressure to get user numbers up so we could raise more money. This isn’t the way to run a company, particularly one with an ambitious technological vision. We ended up making a string of tactical moves rather than taking a step back and looking at the big picture. As a consequence, we ran out of money before we could get the product to where it needed to be. Don’t make this mistake.
This shouldn’t be construed as a criticism of Mangrove Capital Partners, who led our series A investment round. They are a fantastic group of individuals whom I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend to any entrepreneur seeking funding, and a classic example of a VC who really does offer much more than money to a budding startup (something they all claim to do). But only a company’s founder has a single-minded focus on the company’s success, and this includes acquiring a war chest to deal with unforeseen contingencies.
Be pessimistic about the technical challenges
A direct corollary of the previous point is that you need to make a very thorough and sober assessment of the technical challenges you are facing. Make sure that you are being realistic about deployment timeframes. Then double them. In retrospect, it seems obvious and absolutely normal that it would take us the better part of two years to build a new peer-to-peer stack from the ground up and deploy it in a scalable way, especially considering that no one has built anything nearly as complex on top of Firefox before or since. But in the heady days of early 2006 we expected the product to be ready for prime time much sooner. This led to unrealistic expectations on the part of our investors (entirely our fault) and impatience on the part of our fans. It is far easier to make this type of judgment in hindsight, of course, so it’s best to be as pessimistic as possible when communicating milestones.
The viability of consumer peer-to-peer
To a large extent, AllPeers was a bet on the strategic advantage that could be gained by using a peer-to-peer network rather than a centralized server. I still feel that this was a great bet, and I don’t regret making it. As any poker player knows, sometimes even good bets don’t pay off.
Nonetheless, with all the real-world experience of building a P2P network behind me, my opinion as a technologist is that the huge challenges of deploying a consumer P2P app outweigh the advantages. The notable exception is for products that aim primarily to avoid a central point of attack (for security reasons, to exchange copyrighted works without authorization, etc.). No one would put up with the relatively crappy user experience of BitTorrent versus, say, iTunes if it weren’t for considerations of this type.
The biggest problem with consumer P2P is that other users must be online in order for files to be available. With AllPeers, we frequently heard the complaint that “someone shared something with me but when I went to download it, I got a message saying ‘no sources’.” This is intensely frustrating, especially when it is the first experience you have with a new product. Meanwhile, the cost of bandwidth and storage has been plummeting, making centralized solutions increasingly attractive.
This isn’t to say that P2P doesn’t have compelling uses. A hybrid model that uses P2P where possible and a central server otherwise looks more promising since it solves the “no sources” problem mentioned above while retaining much of the efficiency advantage of a decentralized architecture. We had already started to experiment with this at AllPeers, and this would have become a big part of our technological strategy had we had time to finish implementing it. For mass distribution of media, I believe that P2P is most effective when it is implemented at a very low-level in the network stack. Application level code shouldn’t have to worry about it, but wherever possible data should be cached at the edges of the network and delivered from the most efficient location. This is essentially how the web handles distribution of web pages, with caching at the ISP and in the user’s browser. It also underlies the technical strategy of successful companies like Akamai.
Open source/Mozilla
On a more positive note, a decision I will never regret was our choice to implement AllPeers as an open source product on top of Mozilla. I didn’t have any experience beforehand working with open source, having worked mainly with Win32 development on Windows. Nonetheless, it is no exaggeration to say that I was welcomed with open arms (pun intended) by the Mozilla community before anyone had any idea who we were or what we were working on. Recruiting new members to the cause is the lifeblood of any open source project, so newcomers are given the benefit of the doubt even if (like me) they arrive unannounced and bombard people with stupid questions for days on end before they start to get a clue.
The nature of open source software itself makes it a dream platform for any programmer. It is much easier to track down problems and understand programming interfaces when you can drill down into the source code of the platform itself. In many instances, you can gain inspiration from existing code, take it and adapt it, remix it and otherwise benefit from those who have come before you.
I am sometimes critical of what I perceive as the excessively ideological bent of many open source advocates. One of the great things about the open source movement, in my view, is that is provides a strong counterweight to proprietary software. Efficient markets have healthy competition, and the strongest innovation can currently be seen in areas where traditional software competes with open source alternatives. This is true not only of the browser market, but also of operating systems (Windows and OS X vs. Linux), databases (Oracle and Microsoft vs. MySQL) and productivity software (MS Office vs. Open Office), to name just a few. I know a lot of people who want the whole world to go open source, but I think consumers benefit most from the tension between open, closed and all the various gradations that crop up in between.
The best thing about open source is the people. I never made any friends at Microsoft grinding away at my desk with Visual Studio and Microsoft Foundation Classes, but I’ve made scores of new friends in the Mozilla community: smart, passionate, hard-working people spread across the four corners of the globe. Working with open source is a rare opportunity to gain a competitive edge in the technology business and have fun doing it. I’d recommend it unhesitatingly to any software entrepreneur.
P2P Start-Up AllPeers Closing Down
AllPeers, a personal P2P file-sharing startup based in Oxford, England, is down for the count. The company founders announced on AllPeers’ blog about the startup’s plans to shut down.
The personal P2P file-sharing space is a crowded one; not many companies can claim success. AllPeers tried to get traction by going open source back in March 2007, but that failed to boost their growth.
Co-founder Matthew Gertner emailed Liz Gannes with this response to her query:
Basically our investors had certain expectations in terms of user base growth. We were very happy with the adoption of the product but they weren’t. When we ran out of cash they weren’t willing to provide additional funding, so we have no choice but to shut the service down. The source code for our client is already open source, and we’re planning to put it up on an independent site like SourceForge or Google Code in case it can be of use to others. We’re still deciding what to do with the server code, but there’s a good chance that we’ll decide to open source that as well.
AllPeers was backed by Index Ventures. I expect to see a brutal shakeout in this particular sector of the file-sharing business. The good news (if you can call it that) is that the AllPeers blog, “Peer Pressure,” is going to stay in business. I have enjoyed Matthew and Cedric’s writings and am glad to hear that they will still be sharing their viewpoints on everything from the web to P2P to startup life.
