[ale] comcast & bittorrent

[David Tomaschik]

Brian Pitts wrote:
> Jim Popovitch wrote:
>   
>> Yes.  Sorta.  It takes X amount of resources to transfer Y file.  If the
>> provider of Y is not spending X, then someone else is somewhere.
>>     
>
> That would be the check we send our ISPs every month.
>
>   
>> Cable providers added caching proxies years ago to handle large and
>> repeated downloads by their users... with BT the reverse situation
>> occurs, that is lots of cable customers are providing the same (or
>> pieces of the same) content on the upstream channel benefiting non-Cable
>> customers.... and there is no way to reverse-cache this.  Why should
>> Cable companies allow/support that?
>>     
>
> There is at least one caching solution specifically tailored for 
> Bittorrent. This slashdot thread discusses it, then proposes multicast 
> as the real answer, and finally devolves into trucks vs. tubes jokes.
>
> http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/08/07/214259
>
> -Brian
>   

Multicast would become even more useful if there was end-to-end Jumbo
frame support... less overhead (percentage) for multicast addressing.

The big problem with all of this is that the nationwide infrastructure
is (in many cases) stuck in the 90s.  Tons of technology has been
invented to improve things (IPv6, multicast, jumbo frames, peer to peer)
and it's still not being implemented.  It's rather ridiculous that
network hardware is still shipping as IPv4 only.

David