Verizon buys into P2P

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Network management is "appropriate and necessary," Verizon wrote in a recent filing defending Comcast's stance against net neutrality. Nevertheless, the ISP and backbone provider said Friday that it is actually using an improved form of peer-to-peer management technology to lower the cost of P2P applications used by customers on its network.

In July 2007, Verizon helped form the P4P Working Group, which aims to cut the impact of P2P applications upon its network. Peer-to-peer apps work by downloading portions of a particular file from all over the world, which can mean that a particular packet of data traverses a great deal of Verizon's fiber. P4P actually works to push the file's packets from within the ISP's network, avoiding paying for the extra bandwidth needed to reach an Internet backbone.

In a traditional P2P network, if a Verizon customer downloads a file, only 6.3 percent of the data will come from another Verizon customer in the same city, said Doug Pasko, senior technologist at the company, in the Associated Press report Friday. In the "P4P" trial, 58 percent of the data came from nearby Verizon users, vastly reducing the company's cost of carrying the traffic.

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