Bittorrent declares war on VoIP, gamers-The next internet meltdown

[tgell]

-{ Quote: "Gamers, VoIP and video conference users beware. The leading BitTorrent software authors have declared war on you - and any users wanting to wring high performance out of their networks. A key design change in the P2P application promises to make the headaches faced by ISPs so far look like a party game. So what's happened, and why does it matter?

Upset about Bell Canada’s system for allocating bandwidth fairly among internet users, the developers of the uTorrent P2P application have decided to make the UDP protocol the default transport protocol for file transfers. BitTorrent implementations have long used UDP to exchange tracker information – the addresses of the computers where files could be found – but the new release uses it in preference to TCP for the actual transfer of files. The implications of this change are enormous." }-

Article (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/12/01/richard_bennett_utorrent_udp/)

[Mrkvonic]

Hello,

I see no problem. UDP has approx. 3 times less overhead than TCP. And it is the most reasonable choice for non-critical apps like video streaming, p2p sharing or voip. People don't care if they miss a fraction of the second in their VoIP session or if a p2p packet does not reach its destination.

In fact, using TCP for p2p would be stupid. TCP is meant for dedicated end-to-end point connections where you want to ensure data is transferred properly. UDP is for en masse best effort.

And it will also help the internet users enjoy more freedom, so good.

Mrk