CacheLogic and BitTorrent Introduce Cache Discovery Protocol
Written by Ernesto on August 07, 2006CacheLogic and BitTorrent announced a strategic partnership to further enable the widespread adoption of P2P technology as a distribution network for commercial video and other rich digital content. One of the key projects is the development of the revolutionary Cache Discovery Protocol (CDP).
The “Cache Discovery Protocol” is already implemented in the latest version of the mainline client The protocol allows ISP’s to detect the most popular torrents, cache the data, and seed it. ISP’s like it because it’s cheaper to use bandwidth within their network than to use external traffic.
So in the near future it could be that you’re downloading your favorite torrents from your ISP’s server instead of some random seed or peer at the other side of the globe.
Currently, “regular” BitTorrent is traffic is suffering from throttling ISP’s that claim that BitTorrent traffic is cluttering their pipes. This morivated the developers of the most popular BitTorrent clients implement encryption to protect BitTorrent users from being slowed down by their ISP’s.
However, Bram Cohen, the creator of the BitTorrent protocol and the developer of the mainline BitTorrent client did not believe that encryption was the solution, and found (tohether with Cachelogic) a more ISP friendly alternative. However, this new and improved version is promising the opposite, downloads will be accelerated instead of throttled. However, only for commercially licensed content.
Ashwin Navin, President and Co-founder of BitTorrent states:
“CacheLogic has developed an innovative solution to address a major problem that all ISPs face with respect to network congestion. Today, people use the Internet for many bandwidth-intensive services and consumers are increasingly aware of the quality of service needed for their favourite applications. With the popularity of BitTorrent usage worldwide, ISP networks are being taxed in a way they weren’t designed for. As a remedy to this, the Cache Discovery Protocol is providing carriers with an economical and scalable solution that improves the end-user experience for applications that consumers are growing to love.”
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14 Responses
Sigh. Here goes more forking between Mainline (the official BT client) and Azureus.
Not to mention, we have no idea if ISPs will be forced or willing to provide information on who downloads what from their caches to the authorities.
well for one isp’s surely wont allow downloading of copyrighted material, even if you own the orignal copy, for two, theres the real chance that when they cache your download of windows vista beta 4 that they will turn you into MS for a hefty price. so i doubt this will become popular with legit mainline users OR illegal users as the potential for misuse of the information the isp now can gather is too great, i still think encryption is the way to go, or maby implement an encrypted cache so the isp doesnt know/care what is being cached solong as it remains internal so its on the cheeper pipes?
bah… i work for a major .au ISP and i would argue that the users use their “favourite applications” for sharing ILLEGAL software – hence it probably won’t catch on with any ISP, UNLESS someone creates a new ‘killer service’ to satisfy this great new isp-based p2p seeding capability.
I can say right now that all that is needed for ISPs to provide GREAT service levels to customers for LEGITIMATE application use (web2.0 + video stuff, etc), is to simply throttle back the amount of illegal file trading activities – which is what we’re doing!
It seems to me that this technology is simply providing a solution to a problem that doesn’t quite exist yet.
just wait until the major movie label offer downloads via BT, thats the “legal” killer app
Dan:
ISPs are carriers. It is not their place to cry foul when clients actually utilise the stated capacity of their service, or utilise a greater-than-historical proportion. It is certainly not their place to make merit judgments as to the communications on networks.
It is almost bizarre to think that employees like you feel justified in throttling users for the sole reason that they are using a greater proportion of capacity than you have historically seen. Unfortunately for you, that trend is inexorable and it an unavoidable reality that contention ratios practiced and acceptable when dial-up was predominant are no longer acceptable.
Legal content right now includes a great many small production company releases including but not limited to Star Trek spin offs and anime of all kinds, not to mention viral videos and a great many garage band albums.
This cache idea is great and I for one would love to see it implemented. As for pirates, well lets put it this way, since someone had something someone else wanted there have been thieves and liars.
Oh, the problem exists there is no doubt. My friend owns one of the largest regional ISPs in California and his bandwidth went through the roof with P2P traffic.
All you need to do is figure a 4GB ISO download is equivilent traffic to about 100,000 emails and web pages and you can see how easily this happened.
I’d feel bad for ISPs if the major telcos hadn’t been promising us the moon for the last decade. If they had carried through on their promises (and on the millions given to them by the government), we’d all have fibre to the curb and more capacity than even bittorrent could fill.
How does this distinguish legal from infringing content? If it doesn’t, no ISP will touch it – not with the MPAA sending threatening glances in their direction. But if it does, then there will have to be some type of trusted authority (ie, CacheLogic). Which means there will be burocracy and fees to pay for anyone who wants to take advantage of the cache, to have their content certified and signed as non-infringing.
That achieves nothing. The majority of the traffic will still be unsigned – not just the illegal, but the small and non-profit projects that cant afford the time or money for certification.
Its a perfect guilty-until-proven-innocent system. And if you want to prove your innocence, you have to pay for it.
P2P isn’t used to transfer legal content, its used to transfer copyrighted material to avoid having to pay for it. For movies, music, applications and video games. Trying to come up with a nice system for downloading legal content is a great idea but it ignores that the content being traded is almost entirely illegal to begin with.
[quote comment="9425"]
All you need to do is figure a 4GB ISO download is equivilent traffic to about 100,000 emails and web pages and you can see how easily this happened.[/quote]
So blame open source software for creating linux distributions… that are 4GB in size. No, that wouldn’t be right. Look – torrents are here to stay. They are just as legit as web or email traffic. ISP’s figured out running internal mirrors for sourceforge, Tucows, and others was much cheaper than kicking their users to their peer connections. Do the same for bittorrents – and you’ll have happy users and cheaper bandwidth bills.
[quote comment="9434"]P2P isn’t used to transfer legal content, its used to transfer copyrighted material to avoid having to pay for it. For movies, music, applications and video games. Trying to come up with a nice system for downloading legal content is a great idea but it ignores that the content being traded is almost entirely illegal to begin with.[/quote]
Do you have factual proof of this? Or is this your own opinion of what you typically use your BT client for?
Any technology can be used for good or bad. Cell phones are used by drug dealers because they’re harder to track than a land line… lets make those illegal. No, that would be silly.
So is your argument. There are tens of thousands of legit torrents available – and it allows content providers to spend their money on making quality content – not paying for bandwidth.
Grow up.
Look the reason why ISP’s put up with bt traffic is my fricking money! If they don’t want people who use bt to use their services all they have to do is block it and we will go to the next game in town that will let bt user use bt…simple. Let me tell you about the power of 1. if i have 1 million people giving me 1 dollar a month every month how much do i have? Now that’s why the throttle instead of block and that’s why their greedy little asses will never stop letting bt traffic on their networks. end of story
Essentially this means that data will be distributed in a similar fashion as it is with Usenet. They haven’t shut down Usenet so why wouldn’t ISPs offer BT caches?
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