Hacker News Reader

Doesn't really matter though, still means (Slightly oversimplified) that a peer can connect to 10 hosts and not have to download at all from the origin server. Also this simply isn't true in a lot of European countries where upload and download speeds are equal, but that's a different thing.

View on HN

The math still does not work out.

On an 1:10 asymmetric connection, users would need to remain available for seeding 10 times longer than it takes to download (and presumably watch) the film to have a net positive impact on the system.

That's not exactly realistic, considering that a lot of traffic goes to mobile devices where this would outright kill battery life.

And Smart TVs which lack the computational power/storage/memory to serve traffic.

Can you explain what you mean by that last statement? It does not sound true to me. As far as I can tell (in my country) almost all consumer offers are asymmetric: ADSL, obviously, but also fiber. Symmetric offers are very much for professional access, and typically more expensive.

In Sweden, fiber (which is quite common) is pretty much always symmetric. 100/100 is common, many people have 1000/1000 and there is residential symmetric 10 Gb/s to be had. Asymmetric ADSL and Cable is definitely not uncommon though.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com