Peer-to-Peer Going Mainstream?

By Anne Zieger

July 15, 2003 —

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.

These approaches, only the first in what is likely to be a large number of P-to-P-driven voice apps, offer more reliable distributed connectivity, flexibility and lower costs.

STREAMING MULTIMEDIA
Another area in which peer-to-peer data architectures could make a significant impact is streaming of multimedia content.

Companies such as AllCast, Blue Falcon Networks, ChainCast Networks and Uprizer offer software designed to bounce multimedia across peer-to-peer networks, turning every downstream PC into a rebroadcasting station for the feeds they receive. As the first PCs at the edge receive a multimedia feed from an originating server, a cluster of other PCs connect to them and, in turn, each becomes a host itself.

This multiplier effect, which cuts down dramatically on the need for central servers, can offer substantial cost savings over traditional content delivery companies such as Akamai-anywhere from 50 percent to 90 percent, depending on the specifics of the task, or so these companies claim.

Without a doubt, some types of content are more expensive to deliver than others, cutting down on potential savings. And skeptics argue that the volunteer PCs in this network could drop out too quickly to guarantee quality.

I'd argue that even if vendor claims are exaggerated, the odds are high that in some situations at least, this approach has the potential to offer a meaningful discount over bandwidth- and server-intensive methods. And unless quality is downright terrible, that of course is the bottom line.

A PRACTICAL MIX
In pointing out the benefits of emerging P-to-P data architectures, I don't mean to suggest that enterprise products focused on knowledge management and collaboration are pass?. In fact, I'll predict that the two approaches, P-to-P file sharing and P-to-P data sharing, will merge in interesting ways over the next few years, and in ways that can be capitalized on by developers.

Anne Zieger is chief analyst at Peer to Peer Source

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