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Indian ISPs Speed Up BitTorrent by ‘Peering’ with a Torrent Site

torrentfreak.com

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Re: Indian ISPs Speed Up BitTorrent by ‘Peering’ with a Torrent Site

#11

Post by dogma1138 »

elktea wrote: post #9

Interesting setup. For my company (in Aus) our most expensive cost, by far and away, is the last-mile bandwidth.

That's relatively a new problem for you, 6-7 years ago before the new oceanic cables it would have been a different story.

India isn't that well connected considering it's a nation of 1.5bln people or is it 3 now.

And since many torrent trackers now disable DHT and local peer discovery you tend to get random peers rather than be able to connect to peers close to you which means they get more and more international traffic.

Considering Indian ISPs don't have much to offer in terms of interconnects and peering agreements they most likely pay premium on their end to peer with tier 1 and tier 2 service providers in Europe and the US.

So for them the international bandwidth is very expensive. For you in the down under the available international bandwidth at this point exceeds you local one since the infrastructure lags behind because for many years it was pointless to lay fiber locally as there wasn't enough available bandwidth to feed it.

P.S. I don't think too many people would get your pun most of the users here are far too young and far to restless ;)

Re: Indian ISPs Speed Up BitTorrent by ‘Peering’ with a Torrent Site

#12

Post by wscott »

American ISPs could do this, it would just be marketed differently.

Just remove all speed restrictions to traffic within their own network.

If only traffic leaving your network is a problem for scaling, then don't restrict internal traffic. The P2P clients would naturally favor those local faster peers, and if enough larger ISPs did this, then the P2P clients would be explicitly changed to favor local peers.

Re: Indian ISPs Speed Up BitTorrent by ‘Peering’ with a Torrent Site

#13

Post by icebraining »

mrkgnao wrote: post #7
sundarurfriend wrote: post #3

That's a (technologically) brilliant solution, counter to the usual stuff they do antagonizing and annoying users. Hope this article doesn't end up killing Torbox, and hope more of the new players among Indian ISPs (like ACT, You) take this route too; BSNL is of course never going to do it, and Airtel doing it would probably put Torbox into enough scrutiny to kill it, so I hope they don't! The article keeps mentionin…

Probably other people served by the ISP in, say, the same city?

I'd say so. In Portugal, back when we had caps with different amounts for international vs national vs same-isp traffic, a group made a fork of Emule that could filter the peers based on which group their IP belonged to.

The result (for popular files) was that somebody would download it internationally, then it'd spread nationally and then inside each ISP in stages. It actually worked pretty well.

Re: Indian ISPs Speed Up BitTorrent by ‘Peering’ with a Torrent Site

#14

Post by mani04 »

Quoted from article: "The question is, however, how long this will last..."

I hope people do not link this to promotion of piracy straightaway. I hope there are also enough legal torrent websites that come up, so that the government does not see torrents as illegal and start acting against it.

It is only the content that makes a torrent legal or illegal. The concept of torrent is fantastic.

Re: Indian ISPs Speed Up BitTorrent by ‘Peering’ with a Torrent Site

#16

Post by soneil »

sundarurfriend wrote: post #3

That's a (technologically) brilliant solution, counter to the usual stuff they do antagonizing and annoying users. Hope this article doesn't end up killing Torbox, and hope more of the new players among Indian ISPs (like ACT, You) take this route too; BSNL is of course never going to do it, and Airtel doing it would probably put Torbox into enough scrutiny to kill it, so I hope they don't! The article keeps mentionin…

'local' is pretty fluid in this context. If you can route from A to B without leaving the provider's network, it's 'local enough' for this usage. So if they have their own trunks from one city to the next, customers within the entire country could be 'local enough'. If they use someone else's backbone between cities, then 'local enough' would just be each city.

They're not actually concerned with physical distance, the number of hops, etc. It's simply the case that if they keep it entirely within the provider's network, the traffic costs the provider nothing. This is a huge win for the provider, so it's logical to 'share the win' with the end-customer to encourage such behaviour.

Re: Indian ISPs Speed Up BitTorrent by ‘Peering’ with a Torrent Site

#18

Post by norea-armozel »

wscott wrote: post #12

American ISPs could do this, it would just be marketed differently. Just remove all speed restrictions to traffic within their own network. If only traffic leaving your network is a problem for scaling, then don't restrict internal traffic. The P2P clients would naturally favor those local faster peers, and if enough larger ISPs did this, then the P2P clients would be explicitly changed to favor local peers.

I do remember some ISPs doing web caching way back, but I think when the DMCA was passed they dropped this service for most cases since the liability on copyright infringement outweighed whatever benefits it gave them and their customers.

Re: Indian ISPs Speed Up BitTorrent by ‘Peering’ with a Torrent Site

#19

Post by DarkLinkXXXX »

mani04 wrote: post #14

Quoted from article: "The question is, however, how long this will last..." I hope people do not link this to promotion of piracy straightaway. I hope there are also enough legal torrent websites that come up, so that the government does not see torrents as illegal and start acting against it. It is only the content that makes a torrent legal or illegal. The concept of torrent is fantastic.

What piracy? I'm not a pirate. I'm just downloading multiple terabytes of Linux ISO's each month.

Re: Indian ISPs Speed Up BitTorrent by ‘Peering’ with a Torrent Site

#20

Post by wtmt »

sundarurfriend wrote: post #3

That's a (technologically) brilliant solution, counter to the usual stuff they do antagonizing and annoying users. Hope this article doesn't end up killing Torbox, and hope more of the new players among Indian ISPs (like ACT, You) take this route too; BSNL is of course never going to do it, and Airtel doing it would probably put Torbox into enough scrutiny to kill it, so I hope they don't! The article keeps mentionin…

I'm surprised that users are seeing a big jump in speeds. In my observation, many users in India who use public BitTorrent trackers have a strong tendency to cap their upload speeds heavily and also stop the torrent the moment the download completes in order to get by with whatever they have. This "win-win" scheme that gives local peers to torrent users, if adopted by many other ISPs, would probably result in slower speeds for all users and force them to connect to faster (non-local) peers outside the country.
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