P2P Traffic to Grow Almost 400% over the Next 5 Years, as Legitimate P2P Applications Become a Meaningful Segment

Team Member - J. Gorman - According to a story via Google news P2P network is expected to as stated in the title, grow 400%. Primarily right now P2P networking is largely used to share music, but the article states there has been a huge increase in video content being shared. Additionally, the use of legal P2P content will increase as content providers see the potential to share their content in a more cost-effective way. With legitimate P2P networking expected to grow 10x faster than illegal P2P sharing, would you pay for this type of service if it were available?

Personally, I think if I'm going to be uploading content continuously, Comcast and other ISPs will need to increase their upload caps for households. Right now, depending on the amount of content you would share legally or illegally you as a user could reach your cap very quickly. Additionally, in the basic sense of P2P networking you're basically paying your ISP so that your household can act as a mini-server for sharing content.

In current configurations for ISPs their service is based on a bandwidth cap, which means you're basically allotted a specific amount of bandwidth. However, if you're continually downloading movies you're going to have an increased load on your bandwidth and basically eating up all of it so that your neighbors will have a slower connection. If everyone started using P2P model for downloading and sharing content, which more than likely would be a continuous download/upload scheme, all users would see a significant decrease in speed. In my opinion, ISPs will need to increase bandwidth in order to support the P2P model, otherwise our 8 meg Comcast connection will start running like a 56k connection from the late 90s.

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