Of course, those are just two examples. Business models for how service providers could use P2P networking have yet to be defined. In some cases, though, users may just contribute their idle PC assets out of the goodness of their hearts, says Mahon of Groove Networks. A satellite dish in Puerto Rico is scanning the sky and looking for messages from extraterrestrials. It collects tons of data and then analyzes it to look for messages.
People can volunteer their processing power to analyze the data.
Some people might be willing to do the same for other efforts such as the search for a cure for cancer or human genome mapping, he says. Clearing Barriers Questions relating to reliability, security and interoperability of P2P networking also need to be addressed. When the standard is published, there would be two significant impacts, according to Haley. One, it would create a big opportunity for IBM's Tivoli division, which offers what Haley says is the world's leading resource network management capability. And two, the kind of file sharing P2P supports will likely require a higher level of bandwidth.