The two companies have worked together to deliver a device that will sit in an ISP's network and help manage Bit Torrent traffic.

by Alex Goldman ISP-Planet Managing Editor [December 16, 2008]

I heard rumors that Bit Torrent was considering working with equipment makers, with no more detail, a little over a year ago. But ISP-Planet does not publish rumors and we did not have the ISP-Planet/Access blog yet.

They are rumors no more.

Bit Torrent and Oversi have announced the first of many possible devices that will help ISPs control P2P traffic.

How it works
Eric Klinker, CEO of Bit Torrent, explains how it works. ISPs already have routing rules written for their own hardware. These rules take into account the relative congestion and cost of available traffic paths. Klinker says that ISPs can now give those same instructions to Bit torrent.

The mechanism, Klinker says, tells Bit Torrent clients to prefer some prefixes over others. "The list can be derived from any number of variables. It can be cost, capacity, etc."

The client itself already measures basic variables such as latency and packet loss, and Klinker says ISPs should not put those variables into their own equations because they change so rapidly that the data will be stale by the time it reaches the ISP's customers.

So what choices do ISPs make?

The first rule ISPs implement, Klinker says, is to keep the traffic on net. In other cases, ISPs want to keep the traffic within a specific region. An extreme case is the continent of Australia, where any peer on the continent is preferable to any other peer.

Why
ISPs, Klinker says, are driven by two directives that may conflict. They want to give users what the users want, and users clearly want P2P. On the other hand, the operational people want to manage bandwidth to slow the cycle of network upgrades.

Klinker's resumé includes positions at InterNap and Excite@Home, so he understands the problem. "In 1999, Napster was big, and P2P was the single largest driver of traffic on @Home. When it went away, I vividly recall looking at traffic growth curves, and for at least three months the traffic did not grow until new [P2P] protocols emerged and growth resumed."

So you knew that P2P was the future of the internet and that's why you joined Bit Torrent? "I came to Bit Torrent for different reasons. InterNap was also about content delivery. I saw Bit Torrent not as a consumer technology but as a delivery mechanism for online video. If we could move traffic efficiently, we could deliver tremendous value to content publishers."

Since Bit Torrent eliminates bandwidth costs for publishers, they are no longer punished when a piece of content becomes very popular.

"I understand that this may not be popular with your readers," Klinker admits. "They'll say, 'you're shifting costs onto our network.' But the P2P technology we are implementing today is a scavenger service. The commercial service does not work like consumer clients. It uses only idle capacity and as soon as congestion is measured or detected, the application backs off and yields bandwidth, in the much the same way as the consumer application is designed to utilize only unused capacity on a client's PC."

But what about billing on the 95th percentile? Aren't you pushing up the needle there, raising ISP costs? "We can help ISPs localize traffic, and allow larger networks to hand off to peers, instead of using transit links. I understand both problems and hope we can reach a happy medium with ISPs and deliver benefits to ISPs as we already deliver to customers and content publishers."

Both Bit Torrent and Oversi have joined the IETF ALTO group (Application-Layer Traffic Optimization) to define standards that will make it easier to control P2P.

Bit Torrent has also released its LEDBAT (Low Extra Delay Background Transport) protocol to the IETF.

Pricing and availability
Oversi is responsible for the device. It can control Torrent clients on all or part of an ISP's network, enabling either a low initial investment or a trial (or both). "Oversi NetEnhancer sits on your network," say David Tolub, Oversi president and CEO. "We know where the client's request is located and we can analyze the request and determine the preferred connection."

Pricing is not available at this time, but the product is designed for medium to large networks that experience high traffic volumes.

In the future, expect to see more Bit Torrent announcements, with other equipment makers.

On the Oversi side, Tolub points out that the company already has a device, called the OverCache MSP (Multi Service Platform), that is designed to reduce the load of video and P2P on your network. He points out that the NetAnnouncer does not yet support Gnutella, emu, and other P2P protocols but notes that if the standards work is successful, it will support standards-compliant P2P protocols.

—End