Tuesday, May 25, 2010

BitTorrent: We will Take Charge of Throttling, Instead of ISPs (too Naive?)

  
The TorrentFreak site reports that "BitTorrent Inc. has open sourced uTP ... UTP promises less congestion for ISPs and end users without degrading overall download speeds .. With uTP, uTorrent has become more ‘network aware’ as it will throttle itself if congestion is detected in the network. The uTorrent team hopes this improvement will eliminate the need for ISPs to throttle BitTorrent traffic, while its users should see less interference with other local applications and possibly faster downloads".

See "BitTorrent Open Sources ‘Improved’ BitTorrent Protocol" - here, and BitTorrent's official blog "µTP Open Source Implementation" - here.

However, TorrentFreak remain skeptic and quotes BitTorrent's spokesperson Jenna Broughton: "We have not received any formal feedback from ISPs. Informally, several technical insiders have confirmed a noticeable shift in traffic from TCP to uTP, and they seem generally positive about the deployment thus far. Universally, they commend the spirit of cooperation in helping manage congestion on the network" 


I believe that ISPs need a "wide angle" monitoring of the network, and should have complex traffic management policies when they decide what, whom and to what extent throttle or prioritize certain applications. ISPs only do that with equipment that monitors their entire network traffic and is aware of their business goals and all network constrains.

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