ad astra per aspera

I love days like this. They seem to happen every couple of years for us.. the press pits us (a fun little San Francisco tech company) up against a monolithic industry (like Mass Media a couple years ago, or the Cablecos most recently). Naturally, most of the viewing public assumes we're toast. My friends, for the second time in a row, its clear to us at BitTorrent that conversation wins over litigation.

Today we announced that Comcast and BitTorrent are officially friends (video). We're going to make sure that our products treat each other better because in doing so we create a better experience for our users. Most importantly, this is going to help the Internet community as a whole because we have committed to sharing whatever optimizations are made (to both the network and the application) with other ISPs and application developers through standards bodies (like the IETF and bittorrent.org). This is a win for BitTorrent (big B) and bittorrent (small b) and all of the popular applications on the Internet.

One of the better treatments on the deal we negotiated with Comcast was by Andy Patrizio at InternetNews. Here are some excerpts:

Comcast is migrating to cable data standard DOCSIS 3.0, which can hit speeds of 171 megabits down and 122 megabits up on a four-channel network. "As we roll out DOCSIS 3.0, we will have the ability to introduce speeds of up to 100 megabits to customers over the next two years, with up to 160 megabits or more in the future," said Douglas.

To that end, Comcast has also said it would close the gap between upload and download speeds. Currently, a typical Comcast customer can download at up to six megabits per second, but their upload speeds are just 384 kilobits per second.

That model worked in the '90s, when a click on a link sent out a few bits from the user and a lot of data was sent down to the user's computer. They just didn't need the same bandwidth up as down. But in a social networking world, that model doesn't work any more, maintained Navin.

"If there's anything central to Web 2.0 and apps made in the last few years, people want to have social experiences," he told InternetNews.com. "It's no longer a one-way street. A new model means we need a whole lot more upload capacity than we have today."

This entry was posted on 3.27.2008 at 23:34. You can skip to the end and leave a response.