I know the ISPs are against it. To the point that Netflix essientially threatened to switch to a p2p model if the Comcast peering fiasco wasn't solved amicably.
Peer5 is actually a really interesting example of how the user experience can be improved using peer-to-peer, particularly in areas with less capable internet infrastructures - their technology _only_ kicks in if the user experience can be improved by using peer-to-peer, and it'll fallback to traditional CDNs if they can't improve the experience.
Despite this logic, they were capable of very impressive P2P offloads during the world cup. Their datasheet linked at the bottom of this blog post is worth a read for more details: https://blog.peer5.com/what-a-world-cup/ (email address needed)
>their technology _only_ kicks in if the user experience can be improved by using peer-to-peer
I'm curious on how well that works in practice.
I'd imagine there's more failures modes versus a regular CDN even after the initial decision of P2P or CDN. For example, you're downloading from another user who suddenly closes their app or whose network connection degrades. You can handle that but you'll need a larger buffer, on average, which increases latency.
My gut instinct is there's both technical and business reasons.
From a technical perspective, traditional CDNs are struggling to grasp what it means to be a CDN in the peer-to-peer space, their networks have been built to support traditional HTTP traffic, and they've been fairly successful delivering that. Adapting to cacheable peer-to-peer objects would mean large architectural changes.
From a business perspective I suspect they also see a challenge where encouraging people to chase peer-to-peer oriented solutions may increase adoption, and start to reduce the amount of traffic they're serving from their private edge as more viewers start to peer between each other.
P2P is now slower and less reliable than conventional CDNs. This is a combination of bandwidth becoming cheaper, CDNs getting better (more locations, more peering, etc.), reliable always-on desktop PCs going away, etc.
I disagree. I've seen P2P outperform traditional CDNs many times, take a look at some of the data from Peer5 I linked below around improving the user experience.
P2P doesn't need "always on" boxes in large scale live stream scenarios, which is one of the use cases where it works best. I think we'll see a lot of growth in hybrid P2P/traditional CDN in the next couple of years.
The big problem with P2P is it doubles the bandwidth cost for the end user. Not a problem if we're talking desktops in countries that aren't 3rd world (or Australia). But most mobile plans still have strict bandwidth limits. If you have 10GB of data a month, do you want to use 1GB to stream a live event for a few hours, or 2GB?
https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/04/netfl...