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Comment by robmil | Hacker News Reader

As a Londoner who recently got a 1Gbps up/down connection, I can't wait for this; the limiting factor in saturating my connection is now the rest of the 'net, rather than my own connection — which is actually oddly frustrating. Catch up already!

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It makes one think that perhaps delivering content via a protocol such as BitTorrent is not such a bad idea, since often a limiting factor can be the upstream bandwidth of a site (although obviously this might not work too well for all use-cases, a Torrent-based CDN of some type might still have some kind of future).

Without some special agreement from the upper tier service providers or a Ono-like plugin, this is probably not a good idea.

I would be very grateful if you could go into a little bit more depth with regards to what you mean here on both the special agreement and the ono-like plugin (a google for this showed nothing pertinent, but maybe I'm just being especially dumb?). Thanks!

Sure. Ono is a plugin for the Vuze/Azureus Bittorrent client[1]. It attempts to find peers closest to you.

The reason why increased Bittorrent traffic is that the Bittorrent protocol doesn't require any specific selection of peers. This means that you can have excessive traffic from other areas, which plays havoc with Tier 1 ISP peer agreements. If the protocol isn't modified to work in conjunction with peering, I would expect ISPs to simply kill Bittorrent traffic.

[1] http://aqualab.cs.northwestern.edu/projects/118-ono-reducing...

Thanks - I see your point now. You're right, finding closer peers would be very beneficial in this case.

I have 120Mbps down (Virgin Media, also in the UK), and even with that bandwidth I have the same problem.

There aren't many online services that can chuck >100Mbps at a single user.

What sites or services exist where an average person might legitimately need that much throughput? The most common "bandwidth hog" that I know of is video (specifically, Netflix and Youtube) and even those won't use more than around 5-6 Mbps per stream.

Is this business or personal? I'd be interested to know how much that costs.

Personal, with Hyperoptic. It's £60/month, but that includes a phone service.

What is your actual speed? With a server in Germany? US? Japan?

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