BitTorrent Inc. Wants to Put an End to P2P Throttling

Apparently BitTorrent Inc. has grown tired of having its torrents slowed down by Canadian ISPs and they thought it was about time they did something about it – the company sent a letter to the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC).

As NewTeeVee notes, BitTorrent Inc “has been offering its DNA services to content providers to help with the distribution of video games and other large files. DNA combines BitTorrent distribution with traditional, CDN-based file hosting. A DNA customer usually sees an average of 80 percent of its traffic facilitated via BitTorrent, according to the filing”. The problem is that, in Canada, the percentage plunges to 30 percent, which makes Canadian customers’ interest in P2P-supported CDN solutions greatly decrease.

Anyone who even casually followed the Comcast controversy knows the arguments of both sides by now: ISPs claim that P2P users are bandwidth hogs and that selective throttling measures help to maintain the overall health of the network. P2P vendors, on the other hand, claim that this amounts to unfair competition. Slowing down P2P-based video platforms while others can operate freely essentially favors some vendors while discriminating against others, they say.

Since Rogers and other ISPs have claimed that “BitTorrent is a 24/7 application that puts huge strains on networks by seeding files even when users aren’t in front of their PCs,” the p2p company disagrees saying that “the average BitTorrent client is only active around 4 days each month, or between 10-20% of the time.”
One of the delicate issue brought to the table by the ISPs is has been the behavior of BitTorrent clients, who, some say, use as much bandwidth as is available ignoring other applications or services. BitTorrent Inc. addressed the matter and has introduced a new protocol called uTP which has a much improved congestion control. Although at its release, toward the end of last year, it was received with much suspicion, the protocol proved in the end to be persuasive for the job it was designed to do. “[T]he eventual transition to uTP should have some very positive effects for the ISP community in the area of network congestion,” write the company in its filling confident in the plan to launch the service to all of its users.