Badie05
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Bittorrent declares war on VoIP, gamersGamers, VoIP and video conference users beware. The leading BitTorrent software authors have declared war on you - and any users wanting to wring high performance out of their networks. A key design change in the P2P application promises to make the headaches faced by ISPs so far look like a party game. So what's happened, and why does it matter?
Upset about Bell Canada’s system for allocating bandwidth fairly among internet users, the developers of the uTorrent P2P application have decided to make the UDP protocol the default transport protocol for file transfers. BitTorrent implementations have long used UDP to exchange tracker information – the addresses of the computers where files could be found – but the new release uses it in preference to TCP for the actual transfer of files. The implications of this change are enormous.
As BitTorrent implementations follow uTorrent’s lead – and they will, since uTorrent is owned by BitTorrent Inc, and is regarded as the canonical implementation – the burden of reducing network load during periods of congestion will shift to the remaining TCP uses, the most important of which are web browsing and video streaming.
By most estimates, P2P accounts for close to half of internet traffic today. When this traffic is immune to congestion control, the remaining half will stumble along at roughly a quarter of the bandwidth it has available today: half the raw bandwidth, used with half efficiency, by 95% of internet users. Oops.
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HungryHungryHippo
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I don't get it...are they actually doing something angry? The article makes it seem like they're not doing anything but lowering the bandwidth for everyone.
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Badie05
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Their using the same UDP for Torrents that they are for VOIP and Gaming. So now when ISP's wanna stop Piracy, they disable gamers and VOIP users from ports and features. I am a Bell Canada ISP subscriber believe it or not and them being in the new lately is giving me reason to leave them.
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