A guide to BitTorrent

Bit Torrent came about in the early 2000's shortly after conventional Peer to Peer downloading blew up and everyone and their neighbour's dog were downloading songs off Napster. Subsequent lawsuits and crackdowns led to many of these services ceasing to exist (or in Napster's case, lieing low only to resurface as a legitimate, legal service). Whilst downloading songs and other media was touted as a future standard it was still rather cumbersome to download movies over ISDN and Dial-Up Modem lines.

A few years on and many households now have Broadband internet with many suppliers entry level being at speeds of 2Mb/sec or even 8Mb. These speeds are able to get a lot more done in a lot less time. But still the downloading of content is some what a taboo subject. By now legitimate delivery systems such as Apple's iTunes are able to provide millions of songs, TV shows and recently movie rentals.

So where does BitTorrent come in to this? Well BitTorrent is a protocol that aims to ease the workload of distributing files by not simply going from point A to Point B, rather Point A going to Point B with Points C, D and E all of which also have the same file helping by uploading little "bits" to the download. This system allows for a great level of redundancy so if one uploader experiences hardware or system crashes then all the other uploaders can pick up the slack and the transfers continue.

It was clearly a bit hit since the adoption of this technology has sky rocketed, in a study of internet use conducted in 2004 by CableLabs reported BitTorrent accounting for 18% of all internet traffic, the prevalence of download sites using the BitTorrent means that by now this percentage is likely to have raised exponentially.

So as I previously mentioned BitTorrent has been adopted by many avenues of content delivery, some legal some not so legal. The main Torrent websites you'll ocme across will be of the illegal sort, sites like The Pirate Bay and Mininova offer torrents containing illegal software, movies, music and TV shows. The popularity of these sites has led to much attention from authorities such as the RIAA and MPAA who fervently campaign to shut them down. Some sites have started to promote legal torrents such as musicians who want to release their music for free online (Nine Inch Nails, Radiohead, The Libertines among many).

So apart from the illegal uses how is BitTorrent being used legitimately as a valid content delivery system? Well many different industries are waking up to BitTorrent as a valid medium such as SubPop Records who release tracks and albums viaBitTorrent as it is a fast and more reliable method of downloading music. Many popular podcasts offer BitTorrent as an option to download their programmes again citing the speed and reliability as well as less maintenance since once the fiel has fully downloaded to another person the responsibility of uploading can be spread among more people.

Whilst piracy in the PC game market is a big problem BitTorrent is used by one of the most popular computer games: World of Warcraft, they use BitTorrent to push out game updates and patches, with the millions of users online around the world this choice helps get vital updates out to the community quickly and efficiently. A similar system operates on a number of online games such as Metal Gear Online who are owned by KONAMI, they recommendusing their built in BitTorrent client in order to get faster download speeds.

BitTorrent is clearly a very popular protocol which doesn't show any sign of disappearing like previous Peer to Peer systems, however recent news from America showed that some Internet Service Providers (ISPs) were found to be limiting, or throttling, BitTorrent traffic. This kind of activity isn't uncommon among many ISPs as they come under pressure from the copyright holders.

Many people caused an uproar against the offending supplier and managed to pressure them into reversing their decision, mainly due to campaigning that BitTorrent is being used legitimately by a number of companies and so many ISPs are going to limit traffic only during peak hours (Virgin Media in the UK are stated as limiting speeds during the hours of 4pm to 9pm)

It is worth checking online or via your ISP what hours are worth not downloading during. If they are coy about it and refuse to divulge that information you could try checking yourself, there are a number of Broadband speed tests around that you can check your connection against. There was another test that I found that actively checks to see if your connection is blocking BitTorrent traffic altogether, I've included a link below which takes you to a broadband speed test I've used as well as the BitTorrent checker too. If you find that you use BitTorrent alot for legitimate reasons then you should know whether your supplier is allowing this and if not then you should call customer services to plead your case or look elsewhere for your Broadband connection.

Obviously it stands to reason that if you are downloading illegal files then you really shouldn't be calling up your supplier about why you can't download files. Whilst I'm on the subject I don't in any way condone downloading illegal files and my interest in BitTorrent is strictly in the legal delivery system that can help get content out to many people who need it. Whilst BitTorrent currently has a bit of a bad reputation I fully believe that it is a valid delivery system that can rival high street stores and TV networks, what remains for BitTorrent i nthe future? Who knows?