Altnet and Peer Power

[TankGirl]

Kazaa and Brilliant Digital have been harshly – and rightly - criticized for their sneaky way of setting up a parasitic commercial network (Altnet) on top of the existing FastTrack network. The technical idea behind Altnet is interesting though and has also relevance to community-oriented p2p.

Introducing Altnet

The world is full of unused computing power.

Think about it. Millions of people own extremely powerful computers with fast processors, huge memory capacity, gigantic amounts of disk space and increasingly fast internet connections. You pay for this capacity whether you use it or not. Businesses and organizations meanwhile buy expensive facilities at massive web farms or super computer centers.

Altnet seeks to bring these two groups together. We're pioneering. This is a hugely exciting world where millions of independent computers join together to work on scientific research by way of distributed processing, bandwidth cost reduction, distributed storage, and more. Altnet hopes to reduce serving costs making streaming video and many other new services possible. Of course the distributed processor applications and distributed downloads and distributed storage need to run somewhere - and that's where you get to contribute, and get rewarded.

Altnet is giving you the opportunity to opt in to making certain parts of your computing power, disk space and bandwidth available to Altnet business partners. You will know exactly how a business would use your source at the time of use. You choose what jobs can use your machine and which ones cannot. Altnet will charge its business partners for this service and pass on benefits to you. All this will be conducted with absolute respect for your privacy and your choices.

Here's a scenario: You have a broadband connection and a P4 processor. Generally you leave your PC on all the time and connected to the Internet although you only use it for about 8 hours a day.

You might choose to allow Altnet to use your processing power and bandwidth during the night to render movies for an animation studio. Altnet will install a tiny application on your machine and each night will send you a package or raw data to process into video. While you sleep, your computer renders the video, deletes the raw data and sends the video back to Altnet.
At any time you can enquire into the reward value you have earned and you will be able to redeem according to your agreement with Altnet for this service.

Now if you replace ‘businesses and organizations’ in the above declaration with ‘groups and communities’ a whole different picture emerges. Instead of letting a commercial third-party collect, coordinate and sell our idle computing and bandwidth resources (to anybody with the money) we could collect those resources ourselves and coordinate their use through autonomic groups and communities.

Even relatively small groups would have considerable peer power in storage and bandwidth terms. Say we have a group of 250 peers, each donating on average 1 k/s idle upload bandwidth to the group. Together these 250 modest upload sources would sum up to a hefty 250 k/s ‘transmitter’, enough to send a continuous top quality audio stream or a live video stream to another group. The receiving group could similarly organize itself into a sort of distributed ‘antenna’ collecting the numerous parallel download streams and distributing the results among the group members so that each interested peer could patch a complete stream or object from what has been collectively received.

- tg