It also has a tendency to be full blast all the time. Part of what makes cheap lines cheap is that when you have a lot of people, you can share bandwidth and normal usage patterns are such that they don't interfere with each other. You can see this when you have a roommate in that your cable modem doesn't suddenly feel half the speed just because there's another person using it as well. You'll probably find that it is the same overall. Same deal with an office LAN. You all have 100mbps to your desktops and
I don't think BitTorrent clients are going full blast all the time: one uses the torrent protocol to get content. This content must be consumed and, with a decent connection, one doesn't have the time consume all the content one can get => the bandwith usage is still a series of spikes, even in the case of torrent users.
I'm saying it usually isn't. This is based on my observation of torrent users. Now I'm not talking about the person who uses it to get patches for a game and doesn't know it, or the guy who downloads a Linux ISO for work or something. The ISPs have no problem with them, their bandwidth usage is fairly normal. The people I'm talking about are the torrent head types. Generally they are downloading copyrighted content, though not always. They just go crazy, they download tons and tons and tons of stuff, since
ISP's hate bittorrent (Score:2)
90% of the traffic by a relatively small subset of the consumers. They hates it.
Re: (Score:5, Insightful)
It also has a tendency to be full blast all the time. Part of what makes cheap lines cheap is that when you have a lot of people, you can share bandwidth and normal usage patterns are such that they don't interfere with each other. You can see this when you have a roommate in that your cable modem doesn't suddenly feel half the speed just because there's another person using it as well. You'll probably find that it is the same overall. Same deal with an office LAN. You all have 100mbps to your desktops and
Re: (Score:1)
I'm not saying it can't be (Score:4, Interesting)
I'm saying it usually isn't. This is based on my observation of torrent users. Now I'm not talking about the person who uses it to get patches for a game and doesn't know it, or the guy who downloads a Linux ISO for work or something. The ISPs have no problem with them, their bandwidth usage is fairly normal. The people I'm talking about are the torrent head types. Generally they are downloading copyrighted content, though not always. They just go crazy, they download tons and tons and tons of stuff, since
I'm not saying it can't be promoted. (Score:1, Insightful)
I think you're forgetting in the torrent protocol when someone has a fast enough connection they get promoted to being a supernode.
Re:I'm not saying it can't be promoted. (Score:2)
Buh?