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

["Robb Topolski" <robb at funchords.com>]

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 (robb at funchords.com)
Hillsboro, Oregon USA
http://www.funchords.com/
_______________________________________________
p2pi mailing list
p2pi at ietf.org
https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/p2pi