BitTorrent swarms have a deadly bite on broadband nets

Tue Oct 23 04:35:21 UTC 2007

On Mon, 22 Oct 2007, Majdi S. Abbas wrote:
> 	What hurt these access providers, particularly those in the
> cable market, was a set of failed assumptions.  The Internet became a
> commodity, driven by this web thing.  As a result, standards like DOCSIS
> developed, and bandwidth was allocated, frequently in an asymmetric
> fashion, to access customers.  We have lots of asymmetric access
> technologies, that are not well suited to some new applications.

This doesn't explain why many universities, most with active, symmetric
ethernet switches in residential dorms, have been deploying packet shaping 
technology for even longer than the cable companies.  If the answer was
as simple as upgrading everyone to 100Mbps symmetric ethernet, or even
1Gbps symmetric ethernet, then the university resnet's would be in great 
shape.

Ok, maybe the greedy commercial folks screwed up and deserve what they 
got; but why are the nobel non-profit universities having the same 
problems?