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Ed Felten does a great service to us all, explainnig the ins-and-outs of how BitTorrent actually works.
Now we can see the big win offered by BitTorrent: the download time is independent of the number of users (N), and of the speed of the server's connection (S). Adding more users doesn't make the download faster, but it doesn't make it slower either. (It's also worth noting that if N, the number of users, is small, BitTorrent is worse than old-fashioned systems, by a factor of two.)
With BitTorrent, the bottleneck is the end user's net connection, only half of which can be used for BitTorrent downloads. (The other half must be used for uploads.) Most users' connections, even the broadband ones, will take an awfully long time to download high-quality video content, BitTorrent or not.
Yeah, there's some math there, but it's not a big deal.
Posted by Casper at February 5, 2005 05:32 PM