On Mar 8, 2009, at 4:09 PM, Wes Felter wrote:
On Mar 8, 2009, at 12:15 AM, Nicholas Weaver wrote:
But the key is "when legal shifts to P2P" (eg, like CNN's live
video streaming), they must be able to cache it, because this is
obviously coming down the pike, and spells bad news if it happens
without caching.
I see your point here. But this makes me wonder if P2P caching is
just a way for ISPs to subsidize P2P CDN companies -- another form
of cost shifting. (Will P2P CDNs bill content providers for total
bits delivered, even if those bits were delivered from an ISP-owned
cache?) I suspect economics of this sort is off-topic for IETF so I
won't ramble on any more.
Actually, I don't think its off topic, economics MATTER when building
networks, especially P2P. ISPs understand their economics well, but
many of the P2P boosters don't understand this or refuse to
acknowledge this. Thus I'll argue that this is perfectly on-topic, as
we want to do economically-relevant engineering.
As for caches themselves, if anything, I'd hope the ISP sees their
interest is "don't bill".
Because:
Edge caches for P2P are cheap: By dropping the reliability concerns
(well, by shifting reliability concerns onto clients which have
already addressed them), they cost almost nothing once the software is
designed, and most of the software is already avaliable (since most is
common with client code).
Thus the maximum benefit to the ISP occurs when they are maximally
used. Thus they don't need to build up the very extensive
infrastructure that Akamai or another edge-located CDN does to
tolerate failures.
If the edge caches aren't "free" to content providers, content
providers simply won't use them, because they are shifting towards P2P
because it is "free" to them as long as customers have "not quite
unlimited" network connections. EG, the norwegian public broadcaster
has had a huge success in using BitTorrent in reducing their bandwidth
bills. Once a content provider takes the jump to full P2P, going back
to a world where they have to pay MORE is not going to happen
voluntarily.
Edge caches are partial-deployable: If only ONE major ISP uses such
edge caches, that ISP benefits and the content providers benefit, but
other ISPs don't benefit or really suffer (assuming you have
localization). But partial-deployability is less effective in the
case of charging for data from the cache, as you need to bootstrap up
to at least a certain critical mass before you can bill.
Thus I think its one of those cases where IF the ISPs can resist
charging for edge-cache data delivery, everybody involved in the
content delivery process: the providers, the users, and the ISP, all
win, with only the conventional CDNs losing.
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