- Saturday, 21 November 2009
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I read the newspapers avidly. It is my one form of continuous fiction - Aneurin Bevan
P2P software throttles itself
P2P SOFTWARE OUTFIT Bit Torrent is about to be upgraded so that it can deal with attempts by ISPs to throttle traffic by throttling itself.
Bit Torrent claims that its Utorrent 2.0, which is currently being tested by thousands of people, will eliminate the need for ISPs to throttle or stop BitTorrent traffic, and will optimise downloads for its users.
Speaking to Torrent Freak, Bit Torrent said that its UTP is a new and improved implementation of the BitTorrent protocol that is designed to be network friendly.
With UTP, Utorrent will become network aware by throttling itself if congestion in the network is detected.
It means that ISPs will not need to impose blanket controls as, when needed, Utorrent will decrease upload or download speed to avoid congestion.
Currently it is only the upload speed that will be affected as bandwidth is normally much lower up than down, such that the up-link will almost always get congested before the down-link does.
It works by measuring the time a packet takes to get sent from peer A to peer B, so in theory UTP will detect congestion anywhere on that path, although in practice the congestion most often happens somewhere on the first-mile uplink connection.
A spokesman for Bit Torrent said that the use of its software will mean that ISPs can open their networks to Bit Torrent traffic safe in the knowledge it will not clog them up.
It will save them money because they will not have to invest in traffic shaping hardware.
Of course all this is assuming that throttling is taking place because ISPs are worried about their networks. Some are believed to be carrying out network throttling to discourage P2P 'pirating' at the behest of the big media content cartels. µ
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It will be interesting to see what Robbers (aka Rogers) in Canada does following the release of utorrent 2, then. I can't see it having any effect on their policies, even though this version would stand to increase their revenues (by charging for overusage) without harming network efficiency.
I expect nothing but ignorance from the governments regarding the release of uT 2.0. They'll say all sorts of BS that there are other downloading clients etc etc.
This whole issue of piracy is only being used to turn internet around into a one-way media like they did with the radio.
I thought only Sympatico did the throttling, and I was thinking about switching but I guess there's no point now. Thanks for the heads up. I don't see any ISP will be too happy anyways.
They definitely do (at least in my area - I've heard it varies based on the number of local subscribers or how new the local equipment is). If I didn't most of my tv shows downloaded while at the university during the day I'd have a lot harder time getting them done...and the 720p ones could take all week. Sometimes it surprises me and goes all speedy at home though.