Use some other poor rube's bandwidth; sell it as your own. Brilliant!

Presumably the more traffic the P2P stuff serves, the more value it brings you (in saved CDN costs), and of course Peer5 would like to be paid as much as possible of that. Being paid by the same measure the thing you are replacing is commonly billed by seems sensible.

I was going to ask the same thing. The Accounts & Billing FAQ does seem to concur that you pay for P2P delivery:

> A: For the pay-per-Gigabyte tiers, Peer5 charges you at the end of the month based on the agreed upon price and actual amount of data delivered through our P2P CDN during the period. For the Pro tier, Peer5 bills the flat rate at the beginning of the month. For the free, Starter tier, there is no billing, but we do cap your P2P delivery at 1 TB per month.

The point is that there's no double billing, http traffic is being billed by your existing CDN. P2P traffic is billed by us.

The idea is that you're not double taxed. If you're using a CDN already like Akamai for instance, you wouldn't pay Peer5 for the HTTP bytes. Only Akamai would charge you for that.

But why bill based on the bandwidth at all? Is it just a matter of being easy to understand and will equate to more than request based billing?

With a P2P network the bandwidth isn't being paid for anyway as you're using the end user's outbound connections. The tech behind it does sound interesting but it sounds more like a library than a metered service.

It's just a very standard and easy to understand model that people are familiar with. We may explore some other options in the future.

the more they get onto p2p the more money they make.

And the more is on p2p the faster stuff gets delivered and the happier the users are.