Bit Torrent

[bob at sinister.com (Bob Keyes)]

On Sun, 18 Apr 2004, Jerry Feldman wrote:

> On Sun, 18 Apr 2004 08:49:09 -0400 (EDT)
> Bob Keyes <bob at sinister.com> wrote:
> >
> > Can you imagine what bittorrent could do on a large lan, that had a
> > small upstream? Say, some large university remote and poor enough to
> > have a crappy Internet connection.
> >
> I think there is a double edged sword. Within a large LAN it makes the
> distribution of a software product more efficient, but once you start
> pushing stuff out of the LAN then you could wind up with a mess.

Not really, here's why: BitTorret balances your upload and download
bandwidth. But this is regardless of whether the peers you are exchanging
data with are on your lan, or across the Internet. Therefore, a great
portion of the upload a given client is doing, is within the local area
and therefore not 'expensive'. The more people on the LAN, the more this
is the case.

It's conceivable you could do this on a more limited basis. For instance,
if you and your neighbor were on the same LAN, say for instance connected
in Ad-Hoc 802.11g mode, and had routes added to each other, and were both
using bittorrent to get the same file, you are essentially aggregating
your net connection AND getting 'credit' for it from bittorrent, in terms
of the upload/download balance.

Now imagine this on a city=wide free wireless network, such as the one
we're building at BAWIA. And with 125MBPS becoming the new top-speed in
802.11, this could mean some real fun (note that I don't actually believe
you'd get 125, but maybe half that...still damned nice) - maybe a minute
to download a whole 650MB CD!

Think of this in amounts of less than a CD, but where there is a large
simulataneous demand, such as for patches..even microsoft's security
updates would be quick.