[Infowarrior] - Comcast's P2P Conversion: I'll Believe It When I See Results

[Richard Forno]

Comcast's P2P Conversion: I'll Believe It When I See Results
Posted by: Peter Burrows on March 28
http://blogs.businessweek.com/mt/mt-tb.cgi/9777.1413113105

Is Comcast serious about making nice with the ³peer to peer² technology
crowd? That would seem to be the case given the deal announced yesterday
with BitTorrent Inc., in which the cable giant agreed to stop throttling the
performance of heavy P2P users during peak times, and instead pledged to
invest in the bandwidth and technologies to be able to handle that traffic.
Says BitTorrent CEO Ashwin Navin: ³It¹s a great day for us. A lot of good
can come out of this.²

I think that may well be true‹somewhere down the line. For now, it¹s pretty
clear that this conversion is more about solving a nasty PR problem, than in
truly working with P2P providers to better handle the rising tide of online
video traffic. Clearly, Comcast needs to calm down critics‹including at the
FCC‹who¹ve had a field day since the Associated Press revealed last Fall
that Comcast was throttling the bandwidth to heavy P2P users during peak
times. And BitTorrent was the most convenient partner through which to make
such a move. ³Comcast has been caught with its hand in the cookie jar, and
they¹re trying to quickly close the book on the issue,² says Gilles
BianRosa, CEO of P2P rival Vuze Inc., which filed a complaint with the FCC
last year seeking new rules on how ISPs can manage traffic over their
networks. ³Just putting out a press release doesn¹t push the envelope too
much.² Om Malik was similarly suspicious. And FCC chairman Kevin Martin says
he¹s watching to make sure words are followed by action.

Why such cynicism about the deal with BitTorrent? For starters, the company
is a known quantity to Comcast. BitTorrent president Ashwin Navin says the
company has been having talks with Comcast technologists about they could
use P2P to their advantage for the past 2.5 years, and a year ago Comcast
CTO Tony Werner joined BitTorrent¹s advisory board. Also, BitTorrent
certainly has the right name, since it may lead some to make more of the
deal than really exists. That's because BitTorrent is the name of the most
commonly used software protocol used to distribute P2P traffic. But while
BitTorrent, the company, invented the underlying protocol, it's only one of
many that make software that work with this standard. Vuze, for example, has
created programs (mostly a client called Azureus) that have been downloaded
more than 160 million times.

Navin is quick to admit that politics played a major role in Comcast¹s
turnaround. While his company may have been in talks with Comcast for 2.5
years, it didn¹t find out about Comcast¹s throttling policy until the rest
of the world did. Indeed, BitTorrent has supported Vuze¹s petition with the
FCC.

Rather, Comcast only got serious about partnering with BitTorrent in the
aftermath of amajor PR debacle. Not only did its surreptitious throttling
create a prime-rib of an issue for the Net Neutrality crowd to bite into,
but Comcast's clumsy efforts to deny or at least downplay the significance
only made matters worse. That led to an FCC hearing in January, in which FCC
Chairman Martin vowed to consider regulations on network management
techniques.

Worse, telecom rival Verizon has since stolen the high-ground on this issue.
Just days ago, the AP broke news that the phone giant has not only been
partnering with P2P players, but had done research that suggests the
collaboration can vastly improve download speeds for its broadband
customers. With Verizon now out telling millions of young, Net savvy P2P
users that it's on their side, Comcast can ill afford to stand still.

But if Comcast was serious, a greater symbol of sincerity would have been to
reach out to Vuze, given that it was the company that filed the FCC
petition. From the start, Vuze CEO BianRosa (who, by the way, is a former
McKinsey consultant‹not some wise-acre whippersnapper out to build a
business on piracy), made it clear he hoped the pressure would lead to more
fruitful talks with Comcast. ³From day one, we¹ve said that cooperation is
required,² he says.

Regardless of the depth of Comcast's P2P conversion, yesterday¹s news is a
welcome step forward. At least Comcast will end its efforts to demonize P2P.
I certainly understand the temptation. By some counts, P2P consumes as much
as 60% of all consumer traffic‹and carriers don¹t currently charge extra
beyond normal monthly bills.

But ask the technical experts, and they'll tell you that P2P technology has
a critical role to play if Internet video really is going to become truly
mainstream. By letting the world's PCs store vast amounts of video content,
P2P can lighten the bandwidth load for content owners, who would otherwise
have to pay much higher costs to pipe that fare direct to all of our living
rooms. That's why many P2P companies have been quietly bought up by the
likes of Verisign, Cisco and others in recent years

Even if tech experts have noticed P2P's promise, until recently the general
perception of the technology among the Net-using public is still that
defined for it by Napster, which used P2P approaches to become the first
mainstream piracy site in the late 1990s (not the public company that bears
that name today, which sells licensed music).

Ironically, I think Comcast may have done more than any PR campaign could
have done to revamp P2P's brand-‹from a weapon used by bandwidth-hogging
online pirates, into a tool that all law-abiding consumers should be free to
benefit from. Truth is, technologies are a lot like political revolutions:
they're often dismissed by the prevailing powers as unreliable,
under-powered and un-economical--until they prevail in the marketplace.
Think PC vs. mainframe, Linux vs. Unix and Windows, and even cable versus
broadcast back in the 1970s. We may well look back one day and see Comcast's
conversion as a major milestone in the evolution of P2P. ³The elephant in
the room is that people are using P2P to watch long-form content‹because
it¹s a very powerful platform for the job,² says Bianrosa. ³More people are
starting to realize this.²

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