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Billing
and OSS |
P2P
- Evolution, Revolution or Flash in the Pan
April/May
2002
By Billing @ Tarifica
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If you were to
ask the average computer user what the term P2P means to them, the answer would
undoubtedly contain the words: 'Napster', 'file sharing' and 'copyright infringement'.
P2P has become synonymous with the teenage revolution of file sharing, most
successfully carried out with the sharing of music files.
Prior to public interest being sparked by the well-publicised legal battles
between Napster and the American Recording Industry, P2P was quietly evolving
alongside the Internet. Now it is moving beyond consumer and into the wider
market of corporate computing.
In its simplest form, Person-to-Person describes the process of transacting
with another individual, or more correctly their computer, application or network.
Peer-to-Peer is the enabling technology that makes this process possible. Peer-to-peer
networking can allow hundreds, thousands, or even millions, of computers to
work in tandem - creating in effect the world's most powerful 'supercomputer'
which operates at a fraction of the cost of one standalone unit.
The concept of 'freeing up' the processing, computational power and storage
capabilities of computers, servers, networks or any other area where such resources
exist, is a useful one in a resource-hungry, corporate computing environment.
The potential is immense with estimates of 10 billion MHz of processing power
and 10,000 terabytes of under-utilised storage. The resource supply is relatively
free as resource can be collected and utilised from networked desktop computers
at idle periods, eg at night time, or run in the background behind user applications.
Billing @ Tarifica's findings are:
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1.
Peer-to-peer offers a cost-effective means to process billing data/CDRs
of massive computational demand likely to result from IP content. Savings
could be in the magnitude of 220 per cent using P2P based models.
2. Peer-to-peer offers the
most realistic procedure for real-time QoS based billing. It allows the
users desktop to be monitored for performance of content service delivery
and overcomes the last mile 'blind spot' between the network and the end-user.
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Full market report
(£795 pdf, 155 pages), and free white paper "P2P demystified: introduction
to the technology and potential of P2P", by Paul Merry at: consult@tarifica.com
