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Comment by smhenderson | Hacker News Reader

I'm all about peer to peer to make efficient use of resources but this, to me, is another feature that should be opt in by default.

If you are like me you have a decent connection, know for a fact you're not utilizing as much as you're given and understand how a P2P protocol can help you and those around you.

But your average user doesn't really know what this all means without explanation. IMO most people probably have no idea what the optimal setting for them would be, therefore they will leave it on for fear of breaking something by switching it off.

Cool feature but let those who know better turn it on and let the rest of the masses opt in once their techie friend explains it to them and makes sure it won't hurt with regard to data caps.

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Or perhaps the default should have been "PCs on my local network."

I knew this feature was coming (wasn't paying attention to the details of it, though) and actually thought it is a great feature for actually "reducing" bandwidth usage.

Yeah, that's a good idea too. Kind of WSUS for the home.

The article does say Windows 10 Enterprise and Education have the feature enabled, but only for the local network.

So at least that's a sensible default for business/schools.

It'll actually wreck havoc on a lot of small businesses, actually.

A lot of smaller businesses where operating system upgrades/update cycles are ad hoc, and mostly on whatever comes with their new PCs (which usually is Home editions) and won't or can't upgrade to Enterprise. (I don't know if the Pro version's also set up the same way -- but even then, I wouldn't say there's great incentive/reason there, too, anyways.)

You're right, I hadn't thought of it that way. And, no, the Pro version behaves the same as Home in this case. even more reason for it to be off default and opt in only.

Yeah, I don't even know what Microsoft is thinking then -- practically, the Pro version would be the highest edition accessible to most of small businesses.

There seems to be a lot of poor choices Microsoft decided make on Windows 10... (Wi-fi Sense, and then this...)

If they were going to change anything, I think the LAN-only policy they employ for Enterprise and Education should probably be the default.

That said, instead of changing anything I'd so much rather see MS take this and run with it, working with ISPs to help them understand that this traffic should be exempt (or even rewarded as a bandwidth credit) because it'll lower ISP costs and improve customer satisfaction simlutaneously.

That's pretty much against net neutrality

Not charging for all customer-to-customer or customer-to-cache traffic is pretty neutral. In cable networks, customer-to-customer traffic may increase congestion rather than reducing it, though.

What I mean is that I'd love to see a scheme where ISPs only count any of your bandwidth that traverses their backbone. Or perhaps charged incrementally less per hop in the ISP architecture.

It seems like that would be neutral, simple, and sensible, though I'm not quite sure how peering and colocated caches would be treated. Probably the same as bandwidth for the end user since it's up to ISPs and content providers to do that.

Even people that have a good connection might not have a ton of upload bandwidth. I only get 8 Mbps for instance.

I just installed Win 10 Pro, and my default was to get updates from Microsoft, not peer-to-peer

I upgraded from 8.1 (the free upgrade notification/activation) and it was enabled and set to internet by default.

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