Preamble

In this article, I discuss the NOIA Network and their solution to making the internet quicker, more efficient, and giving users an opportunity to earn a passive income through the use of their idle computing resources. NOIA have already launched their testnet, and are inviting anyone interested in their solution and project to create an account and to start contributing your idle computing resources to the testnet. I'll discuss the benefits of contributing your computing resources to the NOIA Network during this article.

Our internet speeds could be a lot better

In a world where our advances in technology are rapidly progressing, our global internet infrastructure is largely fragmented and often lacks integrity. Our internet speeds vary drastically across the globe, and some developed nations actually have internet speeds that are slower than some developing nations. And these greatly differing internet speeds are largely the reasons as to why data transfers between distant locations can be incredibly slow and inefficient. To many, these problems don't seem like a significant issue. But for website operators who want to deliver content to global audiences, varying internet speeds can be a significant issue. Especially where that content is resource intensive, such as video and live streaming content, which is becoming more and more common in these modern times.

Content Delivery Networks

Content delivery networks (CDNs) were created to help alleviate these data transfer problems.

"CDN providers maintain globally distributed, strategically placed Points of Presence (POP) or Data Centres, that are used to cache content locally and deliver it based on the geographical proximity of a request." Source

CDNs effectively allow for resource intensive content to be loaded quickly, regardless of the geographical location of the website visitor. Currently, CDNs form the backbone of the internet and are responsible for the majority of the content distributed globally today.

Source

In 2016, the CDN market was valued at USD $6 billion. BY 2022, CDNs, and similar products, is projected to grow to a market size of USD $31 billion. This is a big industry, and ripe for disruption. This presents an interesting problem however. The global internet infrastructure is not developing fast enough to manage the ever growing demand. Video content creation, online gaming, Virtual Reality technologies, and streaming of video and gaming content are growing at fantastic rates and shows no sign of slowing down. So it's plainly obvious that our rate of infrastructure development will be hard pressed to keep up with the continually growing demand for our ever more resource intensive content preferences.

Source There's also a few problems with relying solely on CDN infrastructure for content distribution:

CDNs are highly centralised - therefore open for control and manipulation.
Where their distribution is limited, their benefits for content delivery is limited.
The current CDN market is dominated by Akamai and Amazon. Therefore the cost to access these services is decided by only 2 key players in the market.
The infrastructure required, using current technologies, to improve the distribution of bandwidth intensive content worldwide is incredibly expensive. This will likely slow technological developments in this area greatly unless an innovative solution is developed.

The NOIA Solution

When looking at the problem described above, the team behind the NOIA Network recognised that the available bandwidth capacities per household continue to increase rapidly, creating a large volume of idle bandwidth across the globe. This idle bandwidth presents a fantastic opportunity to address the shortfall in available bandwidth globally, and the high level of centralisation in current networks. Every computer that is connected to the internet already forms the backbone of the internet, however these computers typically only consume data, rather than streaming data to other users. As stated in the NOIA white paper:

"By connecting thousands of participants willing to share the idle resources of their personal computers, we can create a sharing economy of data transfer - one that is virtually limitless in terms of scale."

Everyone choosing to participate in the network will pool the unused bandwidth and storage of their computers, creating a highly decentralised and ever scalable network of nodes that are capable of delivering bandwidth intensive content across the globe in a highly efficient manner. A decentralised network provides a wide range of benefits to the consumer, including:

A greater level of security, with no central organisation controlling the Network.
Highly efficient and cost effective, with no central entity controlling the network there are no overheads to pay. In addition, the more nodes on the network and more distributed their locations, the lower the energy costs will be to transmit bandwidth intensive data.
Utilising technology such as this brings with it increased opportunities for innovation, such as other decentralised services, the further development and utilisation of artificial intelligence technologies, and hosting platforms.

The NOIA Technology Stack

The Architechture

The NOIA Network is comprised of two separate structural elements that will define the network and its features:

Content Scaling Layer (CSL)
- Which will include peer to peer file sharing protocols, artificial intelligence, and blockchain technology that will determine how content will be delivered throughout the network.
Governance Layer
- Which is a set of smart contracts located on the Ethereum blockchain which define what NOIA tokens are and how they are transferred between nodes.

Ultimately the CSL will act as the backbone of the network while the governance layer will enable the transfer of value throughout the network.

Who are NOIA?

"NOIA is the next-generation content scaling network, powered by blockchain technology. It utilizes unused bandwidth from computers around the world to create a widely distributed, efficient and integral layer of internet infrastructure for global content delivery. NOIA is designed to serve as a bandwidth optimization mechanism for every type of web content and provide a significantly more effective and decentralized delivery method across the internet." Source

NOIA will use next-generation peer-to-peer (P2P) file sharing protocols, artificial intelligence (AI) and blockchain technology to combine hundreds of thousands of computers to serve as nodes in one single “intranet” and provide an opportunity to every web content provider in the world to use this “intranet” to deliver their content across the globe.

NOIA’s aim is to become a fully self-sustained and decentralised network of hundreds of thousands of nodes that pool together to share their resources, These nodes will be governed by the rules in smart contracts and operated with NOIA tokens. The nodes within this network will serve as a never before seen infrastructure layer that will provide the fastest, most optimised and cost-efficient content delivery system on the internet.

The Team

The team behind this project is impressive. The founders have put together a highly skilled and extensive team of personnel who are well equipped to deliver the project's roadmap.

Founders and Business Team

Advisors

Tech Advisors

The Roadmap

Source

So far, NOIA have achieved all scheduled items on their roadmap, which isn't all that surprising given the size of the team who are working on this project. The Testnet for the NOIA network has already been released. What this means is that NOIA are inviting you to create an account and start using the network, whether that be through providing your computing resources to the network or via the purchase of resourcing power for your project.

Why share your computers bandwidth and storage capacity?

Users who choose to share their computer's idle bandwidth and storage will be rewarded for doing so in the form of NOIA tokens. They can then use these tokens to either purchase services through the NOIA network, hold them with the view of accumulating wealth, or convert them to their currency of choice.

The NOIA Token Economy

The NOIA token is the only currency used within the NOIA network. Therefore, people wanting to purchase services within the NOIA network will purchase these services using the NOIA token. According to the white paper, one token purchases the equivalent of 5 GB of data transfer however this amount is likely to be different today as the value of the token is not pegged. Typically, current content delivery service providers charge around US $0.08 cents per 1 GB of data transfer. NOIA expects that, using their network, 1 GB would cost roughly US $0.01 cents which makes the NOIA Network substantially cheaper than current providers.

Why use the NOIA network to distribute content?

Using the NOIA network will be much more cost effective in comparison to utilising CDN networks. In addition to this, with the ever expanding distribution of nodes on the network, there will be a much greater efficiency in the distribution of content. The high level of efficiency gained on this network is thanks to blockchain technology, which has the capability to be autonomous and is highly scalable.

"A Smart Contracts layer within NOIA’s network governs all relationships between the different actors in the network by providing a framework for the creation and flow of value within it." Source

Using the NOIA Network to create a passive income stream

If you're like me, then you'll really be wanting to know about the potential to create a passive income stream by contributing computing resources to the NOIA Network. This passive income stream will be created by setting up your own node, or series of nodes. The NOIA white paper describes nodes as being:

"Nodes will be comprised of either previously idle home networked computer (which had been a net cost to their owners), and dedicated network endpoints expressly purchased for the purpose of earning NOIA Tokens."

The free market will determine how much each node will earn, particularly due to the variability in the amount of resources each node contributes to the market, however NOIA believes that the median payout per node will be in the vicinity of US $50 per month.

Use of Nodes and Smart Contracts on the Network

NOIA tokens will be awarded to nodes based on a number of variables:

Amount of storage contributed to the network
The bandwidth utilisation (the rate at which a node is serving content)
The uptime factor (how much time is the node available/ accessible on the network)

Assuming that your node is contributing a significant amount of storage capacity, bandwidth and is available 24 hours per day, it could easily expected that you will be earning a passive income above the median rate of US $50 per month. My personal opinion is that the earning potential of the NOIA network is well worth testing. And I'm currently in the process of setting up an account on the NOIA Testnet. If you have a computer available that you can leave running for 72 hours per week or longer, then I encourage you to start contributing to the testnet to determine the level of passive income that you can earn from the NOIA network.

It's a win-win for everyone

Using the NOIA Network is a win-win for both the users who provide bandwidth and storage to the network and for those who choose to distribute their content via this network. Users who provide their bandwidth and storage are rewarded via payment in NOIA tokens while those distributing content via the network are rewarded by a highly efficient network and a highly cost effective network for content distribution. The NOIA Testnet is live! And I encourage you to get involved and try it out. Personally, I'll have my own node set up very soon. I'm very eager to see how many tokens my little computer can generate for me. So set up your own node and let me know how it goes for you. I'll report back to let you know how my own node performs over the coming weeks.

Posted from my blog with SteemPress : https://cryptonbrews.xopus.io/2018/08/29/noia-network-faster-internet-for-us-plus-a-passive-income-for-you/