“P4P is a mechanism that allows ISPs to provide guidance on how peers in
their networks can be efficiently connected”

Really smart P2P software can figure what’s the best route out on the fly. ISP’s guidance works for ISP’s interests, not always peers. Verizon sure has a lot of money to spend around no such projects : LOL

1) P4P is not a P2P protocol. It does not say anything about how data is “broken into smaller packets”, how to manage peers, or what protocols to use to make connections.

2) P4P is not just for torrent-based systems. Although Pando and many other systems out there are BitTorrent derivatives, there’s no reason a fully proprietary system cannot take advantage of P4P.

P4P is a mechanism that allows ISPs to provide guidance on how peers in their networks can be efficiently connected, without sharing exact details of network topology. P2P systems can choose to ignore this data, but when used to guide P2P connections, it can improve localization and reduce painful off-net bandwidth. This ISP ‘guidance’ can take the form of a table that expresses connection preferences between various IP address ranges.

Of course there are other ways to improve traffic localization without P4P support as well, and we are just starting to see these approaches from commercial P2P systems.

As many CDNs have shown, distributing storage is a good thing, but not necessarily all the way to the endpoint. A better approach, both in terms of storage and bandwidth costs (and, for that matter, energy costs) is to distribute content to the edge of the CDN and then provide QOS-specific channels over the broadband network. Consumers pay for QOS channels (if they want them), receiving DVD-like playback of HD content, and content only traverses the broadband network once, as opposed to twice for P-fill-in-the-blank-P distribution models.