I find Bittorent to be a little spotty, at times it works great, all
depending on how many seeders you have, and if they leave open the client
after downloading. It also depends on what you download, if its TV shows
then Bittorent is an excellent way to go as well as music, anything else
your better off with Usenet, and a paid server such as NewsHosting, or
EasyNews. In fact I won't touch Bittorent nowadays as its infested with
**AA looking for john doe law suites. At least with Usenet you can choose
your poison, the **AA are still looking, but at least its not a problem
unless you upload on your regular ISP.
With BitTorrent you are ONLY going to be uploading the files you are
either currently downloading or have just recently downloaded and are
still left as sources for others. Given that the original poster was
using Bittorrent for it's intended purpose (ie distribution of
software he has full legal rights to be downloading), there is
absolutely no RIAA, MPAA or any other **AA organization that could say
anything against him for any reason. It would actually be rather
funny if they tried to bring such a suit to trial since it would
likely result in a whole slew of cases getting thrown out even when
the defendant really was downloading material to which they didn't
have a legal license.
One thing that I am still amazed with is no matter what router you buy,
your still stuck by your less than 10 mbit cable, or DSL connection. Try
this if you have cable, wait until about 4-5 at night and then download a
big harry file from any source? I keep my systems on all the time,
durning peak times you can see the traffic add up and slow down your
connection. I have a hard time checking e-mail at those peak times, I try
to avoid downloading anything as well. DSL in my experience is better in
this regard, as you do not have to fuss with all your neighbors going to
the local hub.
In my experience the real bottleneck is when you get to the internet
providers office and are trying to get to ANY other site. It doesn't
matter if you've got cable or DSL, you end up sharing the same
bandwidth with thousands of other people VERY soon after the
connection leaves your computer.
If you have cable try some sniffing programs sometime, and
see just how much traffic passes over the WAN. I can't wait until fibre
to the home is a reality it seems that everyone is over selling
connections.
They're overselling it because otherwise it would cost a fortune.
Besides, fiber to home won't do you one bit of good unless your ISPs
upstream pipe is greatly increased, not to mention any other jumps
along the way. I find it VERY rare that the last-mile service is your
limiting factor regardless of what sort of broadband service you use
(dial-up, of course, is another story altogether... but really, who
cares about dial-up in this day and age?!? :> )
I once was considering a business account for better
service, but the salesperson could not promise better connection speeds
and would not say so in writing. So I would end up paying more for the
connection just to get better customer service, and maybe a dedicated IP
address, I about fell off my chair laughing.
Have you actually looked at the cost to get dedicated bandwidth? It's
just obscene how much you have to pay, and that just gets you the
bandwidth to some form of backbone. There are still plenty of hops
along the way that could slow things down.
I also thought it was funny as I searched the local cable site and did not
see any reference to Usenet news servers, but when I put in the old
address I still get connected, and other goodness. I guess the unlimited
internet connection is no longer unlimited, but has limits, imagine that.
Our local cable internet company (Rogers, known primarily for their
crappy service) has recently decided to put a 60GB up/60GB down cap on
their "unlimited" service. Of course, even before then I know of
several people, myself included, who received e-mailed warnings saying
that our service would be cut off due to excessive bandwidth use on
their "unlimited" service. They justified it by saying the only way
we could use so much bandwidth was by running a server (which I was
not running at the time, I had just downloaded several different Linux
distributions that month to test out). Not surprisingly, I am no
longer I customer of their (either for internet or TV). The ISP I
have now has limits, but they are very definite, upfront and
professional about stating what those limits are and when they apply.
