[funsec] Not so fast, broadband providers tell big users (fwd)

Tue Mar 13 16:13:01 UTC 2007

On Tue, Mar 13, 2007 at 03:52:57PM +0000, Peter Corlett wrote:
> 
> On Tue, Mar 13, 2007 at 08:27:04AM -0700, Roland Dobbins wrote:
> > On Mar 13, 2007, at 8:17 AM, Chris L. Morrow wrote:
> [...]
> >> what business drivers are there to put more bits on the wire to the end
> >> user?
> > BitTorrent.
> 
> The download speed is however limited by the upload speed of the peers,
> which acts as its own rate-limit given that the bandwidth on broadband
> connections is somewhat asymmetric.

"Ideally" that's how it's supposed to work, but isn't how it works as of
present-day.  Speaking solely about the BitTorrent protocol, upstream
does not affect downstream speed.  In fact, there's a BitTorrent client
out there which specifically *does not* share any of the data being
downloaded (thus acting as a pure leeching client):

http://dcg.ethz.ch/projects/bitthief/

-- 
| Jeremy Chadwick                                 jdc at parodius.com |
| Parodius Networking                        http://www.parodius.com/ |
| UNIX Systems Administrator                   Mountain View, CA, USA |
| Making life hard for others since 1977.               PGP: 4BD6C0CB |