It’s been quite a week in the P2P world, I kept stumbling over peer to peer software issues that compare to personal experiences with malicious viruses.
Before all the P2P fanboys start flaming, please remember that I’m just a user, not a technologist and would appreciate any pointers to some serious technology reporting on any of the following:
Skype
In 2005 my company PodShow started using Skype as our chat and VOIP application of choice before we even had offices. We even said that we were headquartered in ‘Skypesville’.
As we grew, so did our useage, which is a real lifeline with our development team in Romania, it’s a great service, and the current outage hampered day to day operations. The telephony problems are of course easily routed around with a plethora of other VOIP and POTS/Cellular options available. The real problem is that we use Skype 24/7 for chat, file transfers and most importantly ‘presence’. One glance at the buddy list gives me tons of information about who is doing what (we use the status messages a lot) and helps me decide if I can ‘ping’ someone for a quick question.
So what happened here? Information is sparse at best. Could it be that some update or feature was released and propagated throughout all 200+ million peers worldwide? I don’t even know if skype updates in the background. For a service that claims to be decentralized it sure feels like a malicious ‘worm’ that propagated swiftly. Bug or not, the skype team appear baffled as to how to inject an ‘antidote’ into the mesh.
BBC iPlayer
Another P2P issue for me personally. And I’m sure I am not alone.
After installing the BBC’s Windows Media based player, I checked out a couple of shows, I got tired of the long wait for downloads and lack of experience. No biggie, most of the programs I want are still released DRM free as downloadable podcasts, so I’m a happy camper.
Until that is, we arrived at our holiday destination of Fire Island, New York, that has ‘adequate’ bandwidth to do the essentials. We all know how a low bandwidth situation feels, and when the speed started to diminish to an absolute crawl I started investigating my local environment.
Turns out that installing the iPlayer also installs the Kontiki peer to peer service they purchased not too long ago, and even if you quit the player, the file sharing element continues to operate in the background. Unlike Skype or Joost, there is no system tray icon that you can kill to quit the service, and the ’sharing’ of my bandwidth.
Even though the installation pages clearly state what will be installed and what it does, I don’t believe most users read the fine print. I certainly didn’t. A bit of research helped me find the service running on my machine and I killed it, freeing up those few extra drops of bandwidth I needed to operate.
Even though the service and it’s operators (BBC and Microsoft) are reputable corporations, the net result to my user experience was equal to that of rogue applications that made it through my virus scanners and started using my bandwidth and computer resources for operations I didn’t want at the time (if at all) and crunched my bandwidth down to unuseable speeds.
Sure, with the iPlayer it’s all about ’sharing’. But shouldn’t I have the options to take my shovels and buckets home with me when I’m done sharing?
One thing is for sure, the only one in the game who isn’t sharing is the BBC, who decided to go the P2P route presumably to avoid bandwidth charges, much to the british ISP’s chagrin.
Looking at these examples, I’m wondering what the real benefit is to the end users. I certainly see the benefit to companies utilizing them, but the practice has it’s risks.
PodShow ships out a ‘ton’ of bandwidth 24/7, delivering large media files to a global audience. If our CDN or application ‘breaks’ the burden to fix it lies upon us and our partners, with whom we have commercial relationships and can hold accountable and although extremely inconvenient for our audience and users, we don’t have to ask them for any action on their end like reinstalling a new download, as I suspect Skype will do. We also deliver a much more reliable experience, because we are paying for service levels. I don’t understand how the BBC can justify ‘poaching’ its audience’s resources after they have already paid for the programming as part of the annual license fee every individual with a radio or television receiver is obliged to pay by law. I would rather pay a little more and receive reliable service and not have to troubleshoot their ‘virus’ when it unexpectedly bogs me down.
I reiterate that I love what Skype and the BBC offer content-wise, but just don’t see the benefit of using a P2P architecture.
“Looking at these examples, I’m wondering what the real benefit is to the end users. I certainly see the benefit to companies utilizing them, but the practice has it’s risks.”
The benefit to end users is that it benefits the companies. It seems like a roundabout response, but if a content provider can’t provide all the bandwidth themselves, then the user can’t get the content they want. If the content is valued enough, then P2P is a small price to pay, and most certainly smaller than any subscription cost (or ad-serving) a content provider might implement to offset their own bandwidth costs.
And yes, the BBC is being sneaky when they inconspicuously install a hidden P2P client, but the sneakiness can’t be extrapolated blindly to other P2P clients (at least not those used for legitimate purposes and/or backed by legitimate companies, like eBay with Skype and Joost). As you’ve mentioned before, the BBC isn’t a standard for-profit company, it’s a public trust, and so while they should have their shareholder’s (the public) interests in mind, there aren’t very effective mechanisms in place for punishing them when they stray from serving those interests (as exist in the case of “normal” companies).
Good point Martin, of course the cost savings to the companies comes back to the users (in a perfect world), but doing it at the expense of the ISP’s and degradation of service to other network users isn’t a reasonable model imho.
AC
Adam, Sky’s on demand offering uses a similar P2P (if not the same). There is another much bigger issue though on top of a degraded performance.
If you are using a capped ADSL with a limited download allowance, you may find yourself hit with a bill from your ISP for the additional date you have unknowingly propogated to onto the network.
“which is a real lifeline with our development team in Romania”
Uh, you have a development team in Romania? Never mentioned that on the DSC — just SF. What’s the deal, Adam?
@Alan, another ‘fine print’ issue clearly explained, but often overlooked by zealous users!
@SavantSteve: yep, ever sonce we acquired fleapit.com.
They have given us the embeddable video and transcoding backend. They are also a great group as an allround development resource!
So your complaining that Skype went down for a short time? Information is sparse? Not really, its all over the net.
Agreeing with Sir Elton Johns arguement Adam? Because isn’t the internet inherently a P2P app, let’s just just get rid of it. Only partly joking because all of human interaction and community is based on sharing and passing along knowledge it always leads to issues, but it’s that the nature of humanity.
Yes I am sure there is the more technical side to discuss and I’ll leave it to the more technical expert.
Humanity is inherently a P2P app…
ANdy True my friends on Twitter are discussing and passing along the latest news as it becomes available, it’s actually been a great information source about the outage.
@Andy: Please point me to the technical reasons for the failure. As of this posting, skype has been down for over 24 hours for me.
Adam, stop asskissing BBC – they’re ineffective money-wasting commies for God’s sake!
Regarding Skype: their mistake was not to use SIP as fallback technology, but to use P2P only. Behavior of eBay – owners of Skype – is also outrageous because they don’t admit publicly and clearly enough the scale of problems (!global!) and the reasons behind it (I guess that it is throttling by ISPs after they were flooded by malfunction in skype operation).
Conclusion: Skype must proof that they will offer reliable service after repair, or people and companies need to switch to other solutions like Gizmo Project (SIP based! … and with built-in voice recording good for podcast – Skype is too arogant to implement built-iin recording).
Regarding development team in Romania (EU member since January 2007): thank you Adam for using services of EU companies! Romanians are not Slavic like meself and they are the same family like Italians and Spanish but they are fellow EU citizens now. (a Romanian can speak Italian in 2 weeks – their languages are so similar; I was in Romania meself too).
Adam: It doesn’t matter what the technical reason is. Skype it calling it a log in issue. I don’t care all the technical reasons if Podshow goes down again. Its not like Podshow gives the users the technical reasons why it goes down, so why would you expect Skype to be any different? Skype does have a blog on the situation:
http://heartbeat.skype.com/
ANdy, re-read my piece. I’m asking technology journalists to provide better coverage, this is a huge event.
Adam, Skype being offline isn’t a huge event.
Hi Adam,
I did a fast 5 min search through feedraider.com and the conclusion was that *no-one* outside the skype team really knows atm. the cause for the global outage.
There are only guesses now from MS updates, and skype deeb bugs to DoS attack.
-http://blogs.zdnet.com/Ou/?p=683
-http://www.novinite.com/view_news.php?id=84314
-http://www.f-secure.com/weblog/
Didn’t notice that html tags were allowed, which accidently destroyed rest of the post:
As skype is proprietary software, I’d say the best, “official” explanation you can get at this point is from the Skype blog itself, when they feel like giving one.
“
P2P as a content delivery system has all of the disadvantages you and previous commentators mention.
However going forward I think the biggest problem with P2P is that it is entirely unsuited to delivery in the ‘Long Tail’ business mode. More and more the demand for audiovisual content will be that of individuals wanting to access a content item which nobody else is particularly interested in at the time. In such cases there will be no active peers and hence no gain in download speed.
Most of the research I read – and it is voluminous and multilingual – informs me that variants of advertising supported content delivery (q.v. PodShow) have the best long term prospects.
see my comic strip about this SKYPE OUTAGE here:
http://comicstripblog.com/?p=367
(and feel free to put it on your blog or your other page!)
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