Subject: [p2pi] Using Remote Servers, known as Seedboxes, to reduce the uplink strain on last-mile Cable Internet systems

From: "Robb Topolski" <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 2 Jun 2008 12:47:46 -0700

Back in the dial-up days, many ISPs offered a small amount of space on a
server for webhosting.  This offer removed the incentive of their users to
try and stay online 24/7/365 in order to run webservers over their dialup
links.

Most P2P users want to download.  Only a small percentage offers new or rare
content for the sake of doing so.

Most downloaders don't mind uploading.  Many do enjoy the community culture
in file sharing and feel that they're "giving back" by uploading more than
100% of the bytes that they downloaded.  Other P2P users "give back" by
uploading new or rare content, moderating the various forums or databases,
developing software, writing news articles, donating money, and etc..
However, these desires are somewhat secondary.

There's this "DOCSIS" zone between "Cable HSI - Internet Side" and "Cable
HSI - Customer Side." (Owing its origin to the legacy CableTV system and its
bottlenecked configuration to a much older non-symmetric Internet use
pattern, DOCSIS equipment enables Internet protocols on the cable system.)
With a normal BitTorrent download, (normal meaning one that will finish with
a 1 to 1 or 100% upload/download ratio), each byte of that file crosses the
"DOCSIS zone" twice. Once down (usually okay), once back up (usually
constrained).

I propose that Cable HSI providers offer a new free service to encourage
better bandwidth behavior that will significantly reduce the number of P2P
bytes crossing DOCSIS in the upload direction.

The concept is called a "seedbox" and it is described in several searchable
P2P articles. Seedboxes are remote servers (or virtual servers) located at a
point in the network with lower bandwidth constraints.  In a Cable HSI
system, these could be installed in each metropolitan point-of-presence and
offered much as an ISP's optional "Personal Home Page" service is offered.
Each (virtual) box could handle a number of login sessions with enough
allocated memory to handle the file-transfer applications (which is not
necessarily a lot, since these applications are normally designed to run in
the background).

For this idea to work, the user and the creative-works community both must
trust the ISP as least as much as they do now.  Use of a seedbox should
offer no less privacy than a subscriber's IP own address, as privacy is a
concern among many users who are rebellious against claims of copyright
holders.  Likewise, it is important that copyright holders maintain their
present ability to contact suspected infringers for the purposes of
licensing a work or for legal enforcement.   To succeed, the solution
employed by the ISP must not offer users any less privacy or rightsholders
any more disclosure than is the current status quo.

If a user is uploading a new creative work, the seedbox does not help the
Cable HSI last-mile uplink.  However, this scenario is the rare exception
(easily less than 5%).  In all other cases, use of the seedbox eliminates
dragging the bits across DOCSIS in the upload direction.  Instead, the
entire transaction first takes place on the seedbox.  Then, the user
downloads the archive from the seedbox to his home computer and may delete
the seedbox copy.

The ISP can administer the overall bandwidth provided to this service in
such a way that promotes the appropriate user behavior.  The "burstiness"
behavior desired by surfers, game players, and VOIP users is restored to the
DOCSIS segments as the seedboxes will now carry that load in a much more
containable way.

Thoughts, ideas, criticisms welcome...

Robb Topolski

-- 
Robb Topolski ([email-masked])
Hillsboro, Oregon USA
http://www.funchords.com/
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