P4P hype is arriving folks
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20080410-big-isps-push-p4p-as-substitute-for-fcc-regulation.htmlIn their latest filings with the Federal Communications Commission, AT&T and Comcast argue that new breakthroughs in "P4P" network management lessen or eliminate the need for the agency to enact stronger net neutrality rules. Comcast's statement, filed with the FCC on April 9th, hails an announcement by P2P developer Pando Networks that its experiments with P4P technology on a wide variety of U.S. broadband networks have boosted delivery speeds by up to 235 percent.
P4P stands for Proactive network Provider Participation for P2P, a system of support for peer to peer protocols that allows tracking devices to communicate with network management systems about P2P flow. The objective, as four University of Washington and Yale scholars recently concluded in a paper on P4P, is to encourage "a more effective cooperative traffic control between applications and network providers." In short, the technology helps file-sharers pick each other in ways that contribute to a more efficient network.
In a dreamworld this p4p "technology" may have had some sort of application, unfortunately theory does not scale to actual operation, every single p2p network would need a serious rewrite in order to use what amounts to a basic set of ISP friendly "rules", and even doing that would not help make local sources of data available where there are none.
I suspect the FCC will remain unphased by this "look over there" hyperbole.
