Carriers Speak Out On Peer to Peer

Andrew Schmitt from Nyquist Capital has posted his coverage of the Optical Fiber Conference that took place last week. Andrew had the opportunity to ask speakers from AT&T, BT, Comcast and Verizon if they view P2P technology as an opportunity or threat and why.

As you can imagine, the answers were varied and for the most part, all four of the carriers see the growth of P2P but didn't seem too worried about it. For all the talk we hear of P2P, I still know of very few legal applications that's it's currently being used for and I know of very few consumers who have ever consumed content via P2P. Yes, we know services like Joost will soon launch and BitTorrent did just recently, but if those content models don't work, then P2P will be dead in the water. Keep in mind that services like Joost and BitTorrent are NOT P2P services, they are content services that happen to use P2P.