After Dismissing it, Verisign Advocates Peer-to-Peer

Peer-to-peer networks play a major role in reducing the load on websites by allowing people to draw content from other machines that host the same content. In fact, file-sharing sites were the ones to bring popularity to this technology; of course, later the record industry forgot this aspect when taking down many such sites.

Ken Silva, chief technology officer at VeriSign pointed out the importance of p2p networks and advocated their future utility: "Ultimately, peer-to-peer networks are going to make the most sense (to meet demand)," (…)"You're going to get to a point where streaming video to a billion homes from a single point is just not going to be possible.There may be a bad stigma attached to peer-to-peer but it may be necessary in order to distribute the traffic."

Silva believes that ISPs shouldn’t be the only ones to support the costs of network expansion. Social networking sites like YouTube are pointed at as the second party that should address the issue of bandwidth, increasing their delivery platforms (as they contributed a lot to the demand of bandwidth).

Yet, there are internet experts who have a different view on the situation saying that peer-to-peer networks aren’t necessary and that popular sites were already tackling the matter by employing what’s called "content distribution networks" like the one the company Akamai provides.

"If you take advantage of a network of thousands of servers that are distributed across the internet, then you ship content - popular videos, for instance - to those servers and have it served locally," declared Jay Daley, head of IT at Nominet, the operator of the .co.uk domain.

VeriSign claims to have adopted an efficient approach towards the improvement of traffic sites. Part of that was creating servers in India, Cairo and Paris to handle demand in those regions. Apparently, only 20% of the traffic to .com sites from the aforementioned areas had to give up those locations, the rest being managed by local servers. An impressive example comes from China where 95% of the traffic to .com sites was dealt with locally.

According to Verisign, every day, .com websites get over 35 billion requests for information and is to be expected an increase of 100 billion daily "queries" by 2010. Moreover, we learn that the number of times users searched for a .com site had doubled every 18 months starting with 2000.