Verizon embraces P4P, a more efficient P2P tech

Found on Ars Technica on Thursday, 13 March 2008
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P4P, which stands for Proactive network Provider Participation for P2P, ultimately aims to decrease backbone traffic and bring down network operation costs by enabling service providers to communicate information about network conditions to client applications for the purpose of facilitating improved P2P file transfer performance.

Ars spoke with Verizon senior technologist and P4P workgroup co-chair Doug Pasko, who tells us that Verizon observed download performance improvements of approximately 200 percent during tests conducted with Pando. The performance boost can climb as high as 600 percent in some cases.

Verizon condemns illegal filesharing and says that the new protocol is intended for adoption by legal commercial services, but also reiterates that - unlike AT&T - the company has no intention of policing its own network.

Finally an ISP is starting to side with P2P. Filesharing is here, and it will stay, no matter what. So naturally, it should be interesting for providers to help create protocols with the best efficiency.