Why Bittorrent Matters
October 18, 2007
Ubuntu Gutsy came out today, which you should know unless you’ve had your head in the sand for the last week. Digg’s front page has been plastered with stories in anticipation of the big day, and I’m guilty of the hype, too, by writing a silly post earlier this week that made it to the front page without much merit.
It’s time to get a little more serious though, and examine the main reason that Bittorrent, net neutrality, and an unfiltered internet matter. Ubuntu’s Gutsy Gibbon, presumably the most anticipated release yet, is the perfect opportunity to illustrate the problem.
Ubuntu has lots of mirrors. Lots. But it has even more users, most with a big fat broadband pipe. That’s more than enough to bring those mirrors to their knees, even the universities with backbone connections. Here’s an example of what I found tonight, trying to get an image of Gutsy:
Every mirror I tried displayed a similar error. One redirected to a page with a link to the torrents (University of Minnesota, at http://mirror.cs.umn.edu/ubuntu-torrents/torrents.html).
While the big beefy mirrors struggle to deal with the deluge of traffic, bittorrent picks up the slack. This is where the protocol shines! Here’s an example of the speeds I accrued while downloading both the i386 and AMD64 iso files:
That’s pretty much all I have to say. There are some ISPs out there who believe that Bittorrent has no legitimate uses and ISPs that throttle our bandwidth when BT is detected; there are those that want to create a tiered network where this method of file transfer is inaccessible to those without abundant means. Stand up, be counted, use BitTorrent, and be part of the solution instead of the problem.
Thanks.
Posted in blog entries
content rss
October 18th, 2007 at 10:50 pm
Amen to that! torrenting ubuntu as we speak
October 18th, 2007 at 11:05 pm
My ktorrent it’s on full power.
October 19th, 2007 at 12:29 am
bahh. dist-upgrade reports no new packages. i guess i was running gutsy yesterday :p
October 19th, 2007 at 12:30 am
i have kubuntu ready to seed, but, well, im sorry, i have comcast. i cant seed.
October 19th, 2007 at 2:21 am
If only Linux distributions were more than .00000001% of total torrent traffic.
October 19th, 2007 at 4:12 am
Thank you for seeding
October 19th, 2007 at 6:51 am
[...] Getting the most out of your bittorrents by using Ubuntu. These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages. [...]
October 19th, 2007 at 8:58 am
Hells yeah. 700% ratio as we speak. Seeding my head off.
October 19th, 2007 at 9:37 am
I was able to download the entire .iso in 15 minutes, sometimes seeing speeds of 1.2Gb/s and probably averaging about 500kb/s using Azeurus over a Comcast connection.
October 19th, 2007 at 10:34 am
I think people often misunderstand what bit torrent is used for. It is an integral part of the internet and is most often used legally. – Eric Monse
October 19th, 2007 at 10:57 am
Comcast victim here. No torrent for me.
October 19th, 2007 at 2:55 pm
I notice you get fairly fast speeds…
http://abrau.durso.googlepages.com/torrent
October 19th, 2007 at 3:07 pm
[...] ISPs, RIAA, MPAA, are all targeting Bit-torrent, and its users. Torrents are a great way to take bandwidth usage off of a main server, and when something hugely popular, like Ubuntu linux, torrents really [...]
October 22nd, 2007 at 4:27 am
I must say, they’re very decent torrent speeds!
I didn’t have any issues grabbing 7.10 from the UK Mirror as soon as it came out, must have been lucky!
January 11th, 2008 at 5:42 am
Only, bittorrent seems to be so slow, even with many seeds…
January 24th, 2008 at 2:51 am
http://linuxtracker.org/
January 9th, 2010 at 1:18 pm
[...] Why Bittorrent Matters [...]