Peer-to-Peer Computing: Facts, controversies and the impact to society and business
6 April 2011
Podcast
Peer-to-Peer (P2P) is a decentralised file sharing system where computers can download data, store that data and distribute it to other downloaders. This contrasts with client-server where all computers download the data from a single server, sharing its fixed bandwidth.
While it's often associated with illegal file sharing it offers a number of technical and business advantages over the client-server approach and is being used for building large scale distributed applications from document sharing to digital content distribution systems.
