Daily Debrief: How to break the P2P logjam Video

Daily Debrief: How to break the P2P logjam Video Transcript

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>> So you're not happy with the speed of your broadband service? That may be because somebody's hogging the traffic with P-to-P transfers. But maybe, just maybe things are about to change. I'm Charlie Cooper with the CNET News.com Daily Debrief, here with Webware editor-in-chief, Rafe Needleman. Rafe, you had a chance, yesterday, to listen to a very interesting man. Lawrence Roberts, who has a storied history vis-a-vis the Internet, and he's got some interesting ideas about how to solve this logjam. Bring us up to speed.

>> Right. So Lawrence Roberts, in the '60s, developed packet data transfer, which led to the ARPANET, which led to the Internet, which led to the web, which led to BitTorrent, which is now sucking up all the traffic, or 80 percent of the traffic, Dr. Roberts says, on the 'Net, and slowing down the "Net for everybody else, for the 95 percent of people who don't use P-to-P transfer. And he's -- his company, Anagran, has a solution to this, which involves taking the -- discovering what traffic is actually peer-to-peer, and leveling down to the same level that everybody else has so that pipes are shared fairly, per user.

>> And this would work, how? Load balancing automatically? What?

>> I don't pretend to understand all the -- how it determines it, but basically, it understands the state of the connection between all these little -- all the IP connections connected to an ISP. And it knows which ones of those per user are peer-to-peer transfers. And it basically slows them down to the same level that are people are being raised up to. So it equalizes the traffic. So if nobody else is online, the P-to-P guys can have everything, but when other people come online, and want to do, say, a HDPD download, you know, single pipe HDPD download, it basically levels everybody.

>> Now, I'm not sure what other people are doing right now in terms of figuring out a technology response. But this is interesting. It's the first reasonable suggestion that I've heard in quite some time. There is a problem with P-to-P. And some folks, Mark Cuban for instance, has gone public saying, you know, what the answer is? Meter people. Charge them. The more you consume, the more you pay.

>> That's one solution. There are issues with that. I mean the US Internet economy is based on unmetered access. That's how advertising manages to work for everybody.

>> And that's built a billion dollar --

>> Yeah.

>> Multi billion dollar industry.

>> Right. So if you start to meter people's access, then the advertising industry economics get all turned upside down. So maintaining unmetered access while equalizing it on the fairness playing field might be a better solution. And the Anagran solution, especially, is relevant in universities and on campuses where Dr. Roberts says 80 percent of the traffic's being used. And it's just for peer-to-peer, and it's just flattening the bandwidth available for everybody else.

>> Before coming on camera, you and I were talking, and we were comparing the situation here in the United States with Japan or Korea.

>> Or Australia.

>> Or Australia, Down Under, where they don't have to worry about this issue because the broadband rates are faster, and it's relatively inexpensive. Here, at least out in California, my broadband service is going up in price seemingly each year. It's disappointing when you think back to where we were, let's say, 10 years ago, and the promise of what the future held.

>> Right. Well, broadband does need to be affordable because so much more content is being pushed out to it. And so many mainstream giant media companies are pushing people onto the broadband side, with TV downloads, with everything, with voice over IP. And more and more of our daily lives is being pushed onto the Internet. So we've got to maintain the lowering of price. And there's no reason that the price should go up. In technology, price for improved service -- either the price stays the same and the service gets better, or the price goes down and the service stays the same. It's very rare that both rise at the same time.

>> A year from now, though, I'm wondering whether or not we're gonna start to see ISPs who charge you more per hour of connection than they do today.

>> I would not be surprised. I really hope it doesn't happen that way because our economics are built on just the reverse.

>> I'm with you on that.

>> Okay.

>> On behalf of Rafe Needleman, I'm Charlie Cooper. ^M00:04:17 [ Music ]