Scott Howard wrote:
I'd say the majority of ISPs are still not doing P2P caching, although more and more are at least using it on part of their network. If you'd asked me a few months ago I would have said that this number will increase over time, but at the moment in the US at least there seems to be a move away from P2P and back to HTTP/streaming protocols. Why bothered downloading a P2P of a TV show when you can watch it on Hulu, InnerTube or YouTube? Why bothered downloadind a movie when you can stream it form NetFlix?
Obviously this is somewhat anecdotal, however I'm in that latter camp myself. Due to the rather heavy interference in traffic by my ISP where I currently live (Singapore), BitTorrent becomes largely useless for downloads. Shifting to AppleTV where I can get what I want over a legitimate streaming service has meant that it comes down at near line rate (100Mb/s) off the locally hosted content servers via an HTTP stream; which appears to keep myself, the content providers, and my ISP happy. That said - as I mentioned to Cameron offlist - I have seen a reasonably large number of midsize ISPs in Asia deploying P2P Caches. It has not been so common in the telco-size ISPs yet, which I suspect is because the lawyers have heart attacks at the idea. aj