Peer-to-Peer Going Mainstream?
By Anne Zieger
July 15, 2003 —
(Page 1 of 2)
Over the past few years, peer-to-peer architectures have been thrust into the spotlight by the emergence of consumer file sharing.
Perhaps in part due to the fact that file-sharing was big news generating much-needed media attention for start-ups, many of the first-generation enterprise peer-to-peer products focused on file-sharing technologies as well. Several collaborative platforms offering some form of groupware or knowledge management emerged between late 1999 and mid-2001, including Groove Networks, a high-profile venture led by Lotus Notes creator Ray Ozzie.
Over the next year or two, however, a new breed of peer-to-peer technology will be taking center stage. These new products use peer-to-peer architecture as a data-sharing and transmission mechanism, offering unique failover capabilities, data sharing and more-efficient use of bandwidth.
While distributed applications are not themselves a new idea, I'd argue that distributing data via peer-to-peer offers a new take on decentralization, perhaps the most disruptive one I've seen to date. In coming years, expect to see multimedia streaming and Voice-over-IP (VoIP) applications, among others, using peer-to-peer architectures to change the rules of networked data delivery.
VOICE COMMUNICATIONS
While far from mainstream, peer-to-peer-fueled voice communications are attracting growing attention in the telco world. Commercial applications have begun appearing that use P-to-P-based decentralization to make voice services more efficient. And network administrators have quietly begun to experiment with P-to-P-based VoIP on their wireless LANs, often to good effect if the newsgroup gossip holds true.
Commercial developers working in this arena include Mera Networks, which offers VoIP technologies, and Mesh Networks, which designs and develops mobile broadband network technologies.
Mera's xPEERience product offers what it calls virtual private telephony, using peer-to-peer connections to establish VoIP connections across a corporate network. XPEERience connects specialized network nodes directly on a P-to-P basis, making a central PBX unnecessary.
Mesh Networks, for its part, uses ad hoc peer-to-peer networking to move voice calls and other data back and forth from wireless to wired networks. The company's technology sends voice packets multihopping from wired PCs to wireless devices on a peer-to-peer basis, avoiding heavy lifting by the network infrastructure. With data shared by such devices, companies often can deploy fewer access points, and voice/data communications can travel without a server involved.
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