from Hacker News

Indian ISPs Speed Up BitTorrent by ‘Peering’ with a Torrent Site

by chetangole on 8/29/16, 8:58 AM with 31 comments

• by newscracker on 8/29/16, 1:44 PM

  > From a networking perspective most Internet providers are generally not very happy with BitTorrent users.

  > These users place a heavy load on the network and can reduce the performance experienced by other subscribers. In addition, the huge amount of data transferred outside the ISPs’ own networks is also very costly.

  This could be re-stated with "BitTorrent" replaced with "video" and would still have the same meaning. It seems like ISPs are just acting like insurance companies and depend on the average use being low. It's as if they want to give the users less than what the users pay for instead of improving their networks. I get that managing load, utilization (and maximum demand) over time is not easy, but I doubt if the ISPs have a good enough capacity in the first place considering that many users do consume a lot of video content (which requires higher bandwidth and uses more of the capacity).

• by sundarurfriend on 8/29/16, 10:08 AM

  That's a (technologically) brilliant solution, counter to the usual stuff they do antagonizing and annoying users. Hope this article doesn't end up killing Torbox, and hope more of the new players among Indian ISPs (like ACT, You) take this route too; BSNL is of course never going to do it, and Airtel doing it would probably put Torbox into enough scrutiny to kill it, so I hope they don't!

  The article keeps mentioning peers in "local network" repeatedly - as an eternal beginner in the networking world, I wonder what exactly they mean. It's obviously not creating LANs willy-nilly (...right?), so what level do they consider "local" here?

• by mani04 on 8/29/16, 11:34 AM

  Quoted from article: "The question is, however, how long this will last..."

  I hope people do not link this to promotion of piracy straightaway. I hope there are also enough legal torrent websites that come up, so that the government does not see torrents as illegal and start acting against it.

  It is only the content that makes a torrent legal or illegal. The concept of torrent is fantastic.

• by wscott on 8/29/16, 11:06 AM

  American ISPs could do this, it would just be marketed differently.

  Just remove all speed restrictions to traffic within their own network.

  If only traffic leaving your network is a problem for scaling, then don't restrict internal traffic. The P2P clients would naturally favor those local faster peers, and if enough larger ISPs did this, then the P2P clients would be explicitly changed to favor local peers.

• by dogma1138 on 8/29/16, 10:35 AM

  Israeli ISPs did that 10+ years ago it didn't end well the BSA and a few other copyrights owners went after them. Another thing that some ISPs did to torrent users was injecting the the "upload rate cheat" into their customers traffic to get them banned on trackers that detect traffic faking.

• by manquer on 8/29/16, 2:54 PM

  Some ISPs do not count upload traffic towards the data caps. This encourages upload/seeding behaviour which results in higher % of local peers, reducing their cost and increasing user experience. From a networking perspective it makes sense as traffic is usually one way from DC towards user. If they can reshape it becomes efficient and cost effective.

  Some universities had another way of doing something similar, torrents and similar services are for most part blocked within the network. However local file sharing services like DC++ thrived, the administration is well aware of this, but do not do anything. The few people who get content from outside share internally. Performance was great as sharing was effectively only WAN and the university saved on bandwidth

• by nenreme on 8/29/16, 11:42 AM

  Some ISPs in Russia were doing the same (I don't know if they still do). The idea is that *.torrent files contain retracker.local in the list of trackers, this tracker is local to each ISP and will respond with local peers.

• by rutherblood on 8/29/16, 10:20 AM

  "Ironically, many ISPs have also been ordered by courts to block access to hundreds of piracy sites, including many torrent search engines. For now, however, Torbox remains freely accessible."

  yep that's the india i know

• by toyg on 8/29/16, 3:47 PM

  In Italy one of the first providers to offer "fiber to the building" (Fastweb) basically tolerated on their network a huge seedbox / ftp / file exchange that everybody knew about. This was better for them, because keeping things local as much as possible kept their costs down and real internet traffic light.

  I don't know if that "thing" is still there, I expect the copyright ayatollah will have eventually cracked down on it.

• by elktea on 8/29/16, 10:38 AM

  Interesting setup. For my company (in Aus) our most expensive cost, by far and away, is the last-mile bandwidth.

• by epx on 8/29/16, 3:25 PM

  Nothing new, I heard about an ISP that, oriented by the law dept, even put the local peer in the DSL IP range so it looked like yet another client. The peer saved lots and lots of international bandwidth.

• by skibz on 8/29/16, 9:31 AM

  torbox.net is down

• by mrkgnao on 8/29/16, 10:34 AM

  Yes, and we love them for it.