Monday, August 20, 2007

Comcast Initiates Coverage Of BitTorrent, And Their IPO, With A "Hold"


Comcast is essentially initiating coverage of the BitTorrent IPO with a "hold" rating.

Will more ISPs put a hold on BitTorrent traffic?

Is it false advertising if your ISP advertises x speed, but only delivers y?
Comcast
Besides BitTorrent, what other methods allow faster Internet downloads?

The Street.com discusses BitTorrent as the next gigantic tech IPO.

CNN calls peer-to-peer file sharing service BitTorrent the Next Big IPO

Much of BitTorrent's popularity is due to its ability to break the download bottleneck.

"Rather than load a file from a single server to any and all PCs that want it, BitTorrent's software divides up a file so that users essentially download it from each other. Not only is BitTorrent faster and less taxing on bandwidth resources, it's also cheaper than conventional downloading".

I wonder, could BitTorrent's future, and IPO, already be in jeopardy?

TorrentFreak discovers Comcast throttling BitTorrent traffic.

"Over the past weeks more and more Comcast users started to notice that their BitTorrent transfers were cut off. Most users report a significant decrease in download speeds, and even worse, they are unable to seed their downloads."

"ISPs have been throttling BitTorrent traffic for almost two years now. Most ISPs simply limit the available bandwidth for BitTorrent traffic, but Comcast takes it one step further, and prevents their customers from seeding."

Here's an interesting take from the ISPs.

"One of the ISPs that joined our discussions said: “The fact is, P2P is (from my point of view) a plague - a cancer, that will consume all the bandwidth that I can provide. It’s an insatiable appetite.”, and another one stated: “P2P applications can cripple a network, they’re like leaches."

"Just because you pay 49.99 for a 1.5-3.0mbps connection doesn’t mean your entitled to use whatever protocols you wish on your ISP’s network without them provisioning it to make the network experience good for all users involved.”

Are we looking for more bandwidth, or just bandwidth efficiency?

Click here for your Internet speed.

1 comment:

Unknown said...

Shutting down a service is a frantic reaction to something that in most cases (and I'm more experience in the wireless world) the service provider had not anticipated would get such adoption.
The right thing to do is to figure out how to harness and monetize this unexpected growth.
Will putting it to eternal sleep make it go away? wrong! big trees drop seeds around them, and soon enough there will be workarounds and hacks. if anything, this approach will cause more pain than gain to the provider, and certainly some unhappiness from their subscribers.