P2P Jam February
2001
Could the descendants of Napster cause gridlock
on the information superhighway?
Fears are being raised that peer-to-peer (P2P)
networking applications - increasingly touted as essential to the
future of the Internet - could result in massive bottlenecks as
they overload communications infrastructure.
A report by Gartner Group says that concerns around
the legal and philosophical implications of applications such as
Napster and Gnutella, which allow users to share information more
or less directly without the need for a server, have distracted
users from the nuts and bolts of Internet access. Current planners
involved in rolling out broadband access have not taken account
of the fact that P2P usage could result in a massive strain on the
system.
Samples from Napster revealed that more than 12,000
computers were sharing information at any time, moving 8.25 terrabytes
within a three-week period. Although an MP3 album typically occupies
30Mb (compared to around 600Mb for an audio CD), the concern is
that each broadband user could easily download a gigabyte a day,
increasing exponentially the amount of traffic on the Net.
Ironically, experts such as Pat Gelsinger from
Intel has been arguing for some time that P2P will become even more
important to the future of the mobile Internet. Gelsinger has claimed
that it is 'the biggest thing since Mosaic' and will revolutionise
networking because no longer will users have to upload files to
servers: their informaiton will simply become available as they
save it on their hard drives.
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