5 - Commercial P2P

Posted on 10 Dec 2007 at 11:08

Of the ten predictions listed here, this one is probably the long shot, but please bear with us as we gaze into our crystal ball. Let's start with a fact: commercial internet bandwidth isn't cheap. You might be paying only £20 a month for your 8Mb/sec broadband service, but a similar commercial feed could cost about 30 times more. That's because the speed will be guaranteed, there won't be any contention, and the provider will offer five-nines (99.999%) reliability.

Now imagine the bandwidth that's required by huge software companies such as Microsoft, Adobe or Apple. The numbers are enormous, both in terms of bits per second and dollars per annum. But those costs can be reduced using an idea that has been around for a while: P2P, or peer-to-peer networking. Why download the latest Windows patch from across the Atlantic when you can grab it from across the street? Of course, P2P has something of a bad reputation due to its association with software, music and movie piracy. Behind our backs, though, it's slowly going mainstream. The BBC and Sky are already using P2P for their video download services, and we reckon it's only a matter of time before the software distribution industry wakes up and joins them.

Next: 6 - Disc Arrays/geographically split storage

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Author: Stewart Mitchell