Orbit

Picked this one on IETF...

If you think we start to have broadband in the Pacific, Think again...

Cheers

-------- Original Message -------- Subject: RE: TCP bandwidth usage was: Yahoo is not using ESMTP Date: Tue, 16 Nov 2004 21:14:13 -0800 From: Michel Py michel@arneill-py.sacramento.ca.us To: Paul Hoffman / VPNC paul.hoffman@vpnc.org, ietf@ietf.org

Paul Hoffman / VPNC wrote: What Michael said. This is probably below the radar for now because, so far, BitTorrent trading of large files (regular TV shows and pirated movies) is more popular in Asia and Europe than in the US.

Indeed, I made that very point on Nanog a couple months ago. But it will arrive in America sooner or later and I don't see anything stopping that freight train. Plenty of overseas torrent sites (such as www.torrentbits.org, located in the NL) are in English, no language barrier here.

Even on the well-known BitTorrent ports, there is a *huge* amount of trading going on.

Approaching a petabyte per day (that's right, 1K terabytes) me thinks. And it might get worse soon: double-layer DVD burners are out (I bought one for $79 last week), in a short while we will see blank double-layer DVDs at the current DVD-R prices ($0.40 a pop) and images that are 8.7 GBytes instead of 4.7 GBytes. Christmas 2005: blue ray DVDs :-( $DEITY help ISPs.

<conspiracy theory> Cisco is supporting 10+ Gbyte file swap to sell more CRS-1s. Juniper is supporting 10+ Gbyte file swap to sell more T-640s. </conspiracy theory>

To make things more difficult for the law, a good chunk of that trading is completely legitimate, allowed-use music trading of artists who actively encourage trading of live show recordings.

And some that encourage distributing software and/or software updates that way. I foresee small players publishing a torrent instead of having their FTP site, and seed it only with a few low-bandwidth machines. BitTorrent was not originally designed to swap illegal content.

Technically speaking, hard to take it down too. Last week, I successfully tested resuming multiple downloads with re-published torrents pointing to a different tracker than the original one that was taken down. No problem.

And it's not such a big deal to run a big site, apparently:

TorrentBits.org is situated on a dedicated server in the Netherlands. For the moment we have monthly running costs of approximately € 213.

Private torrent site for 100,000 users....

Michel.