With researchers at Yale University and a group of companies that make file-sharing software, Verizon collaborated to enable faster downloads for consumers and lower costs for participating ISPs.

In a traditional P2P network, if a Verizon customer downloads a file, only 6.3 percent of the data will come from another Verizon customer in the same city, said Doug Pasko, senior technologist at the company. In the "P4P" trial, 58 percent of the data came from nearby Verizon users, vastly reducing the company's cost of carrying the traffic.

Levitan said the technology might be ready for use by next month, when NBC makes available free downloads of its TV shows using Pando's software. The shows will be financed by advertising, and P2P technology will be an essential way for NBC to cut costs. Distributing an hourlong TV show in high definition using traditional delivery systems would cost the network about $1. With P2P technology, that cost can be cut by 75 to 90 percent.

Around 2000-2002 I was talking a fair amount about creating a protocol for ordering lists of IPs by network location. My idea was fairly simple.. Create server software that would hold a full BGP route table in memory and respond to requests (over UDP based protocol probably) to score a list of IP addresses. The software would return the list of IPs with scores based on how close they were to you based on AS paths. P2P clients could then decide what peers they connect to based on the scores the server handed back. The end result would be that clients could be coded to prefer connections to clients closest to them.

These servers could live anywhere on the Internet, and could be run by anyone who is in a position to receive full BGP routes.

I mentioned this idea to Bram Cohen at a BSD users group meeting in San Francisco, and he seemed to think it was a lousy idea.. Around that time, I stopped caring..

Cable companies have been the toughest on P2P file-sharing. Comcast Corp., the country's largest cable company, is being investigated by the Federal Communications Commission for secretly placing temporary roadblocks in the way of file-sharing traffic. Other cable companies admit to using less drastic methods to slow file-sharing and keep it from drowning out other forms of traffic.

AT&T Inc., the country's largest phone company, is a member of the P4P Working Group and has participated in a simulation similar to Verizon's test. But it has also has said it is looking at ways to filter out pirated content from its lines, which presumably would mean blocking some P2P traffic. Verizon rejects that approach.

"Verizon does not accept the role of network police agency," the company said.

Hopefully a more ISPs follow Verizon's lead. (I never though I'd see myself type that sentence...)