I’m on my way to Taipei, so this post will be the last one until I recover from the 24 hour trip and 13 hour time difference.
I wanted to mention Tom Offenbach’s very interesting blog post about peering at the edge. Tom says:
1. Internet access is becoming increasingly ubiquitous.
2. P2P can improve download efficiency and save costs, but it works best when sharing happens locally. The closer your peers, the fewer hops the data has to travel.
3. It’s crazy that last mile service providers aren’t peering with one another. If Tom has Comcast and his next door neighbor has Pac Bell DSL, a P2P request from the neighbor would have to travel through Pac Bell’s Central Office, Pac Bell’s regional hub, Pac Bell’s upstream provider, some public peering point, Level 3, Comcast’s regional data center, Comcast’s headend and Comcast’s neighborhood node before it reaches Tom.
(BTW, this is the kind of inefficiency that CoralCDN is trying to quantify through its Illuminati network measurement project.)
Instead of this madness, Tom wants to know why Comcast and Pac Bell can’t peer at the Central Office or headend level?
Let’s say this does happen down the line. With increasing P2P efficiency, more and more of your customers’ content will be shared at the edge, rather than downloaded from your data center. The good news is, you’d be under less pressure to deploy additional GigEs (or 10GigEs – and sooner or later, 100GigEs). On the other hand, the high capacity network that you’ve invested heavily in may become less of a value proposition.
A few months ago, Jon Udell (who recently became a Microsoft evangelist) wrote in an InfoWorld article that:
“We’ve already seen how open source software projects harness collective effort to produce quality results. We’re now seeing how open content projects such as Wikipedia do the same. Can open infrastructure be far behind?”
I was intrigued by the idea and dug up a bit of info on other open infrastructure projects besides CoralCDN. All are academic, and none have been commercialized. Lots of cool technologies are out there though. Makes me wonder what the web hosting business will look like 5 years from now…
