Pando CEO: The 'CDN of the Future' Will Include P2P

We all know why the rise of P2P technologies is stalling. Many of the leading service providers (BBC is a good example) understand that P2P cannot deliver the quality of service levels to provide a continuously good user experience. No larger brand is going to jeopardize its brand equity to be associated with a quality prone product or service.

Being dependant on the amount of users that are concurrently online, that have opted in to seed a specific title (video) and that are not using their already narrow upstream bandwidth for other purposes is simply too much to ask for.

Therefore, and not surprisingly, most of the P2P network providers must revert back to streaming technologies to make up for the lack in P2P delivery efficiency.

Is P2P going to be used in the future to replace a portion of the CDNs delivery over internet? I suppose it depends mainly on the ISPs to embrace this idea. With oversubscription as their main business model and frightening and fast increase in bandwidth consumption P2P only adds to the over-the-top traffic problem that ISPs are trying to cope with.

Network providers and ISPs have other delivery technologies they can choose from. Why not utilize the entire bandwidth spectrum at hand. Off-peak time bandwidth is available in abundance and is just waiting to be tapped into. What if there was a way to shift the majority of bandwidth intense traffic - yes, we are referring to video - to the most economical time window/s on the network. All this underutilized bandwidth would suddenly come in very handy and improve each network's/ISP's overall delivery efficiency and of course bottom line results.

What will it take for the network players to understand that the solution to their problem lies in the activation of IP multicast on their networks? If we then add a personalization component to the equation, which enables to determine each user’s personal preference and then push the content directly to each user’s personal storage via a scheduled delivery process, we suddenly get a very smart, efficient and scalable network that can handle the onslaught of video traffic. Multicast-to-Storage technology delivers on this promise and therefore needs to be considered when looking at the future of content delivery networks.

In the end the future of content delivery will be a mesh up of different technologies each providing a crucial component in the delivery process. The user will not care how he receives his personalized content; he just wants to get it in the best possible quality.