Bittorrent

BitTorrent is a peer-to-peer (p2p) communications technology that allows for large amounts of data to be shared without the original distributor incurring the high hardware, hosting and bandwidth costs. With BitTorrent, as the data is distributed to other peers, they then share the data that they have already downloaded with other peers, taking the load off of the original distributor or seed. The BitTorrent technology was created by Bram Cohen in 2001. To use the technology, all you need to do is download a BitTorrent client and download a small file called a .torrent file. The client then connects you to the BitTorrent tracker, which you will then begin to download the file from the completed seeds and upload to the other peers or leechers. There is a large selection of clients available to use but the two most popular are Utorrent and Azureus. A growing number of individuals and organizations are using BitTorrent to distribute material of their own or belongs to others. Such organizations such as independent movie and music companies use BitTorrent to distribute their releases because of the low costs to do so. The open source operating system, Linux, uses BitTorrent to distribute every distribution of its operating system to its users. Even though it is legal, BitTorrent has had some legal issues since it has quickly become the number one method used to download copyrighted and unlicensed material. BitTorrent traffic is considered to take up almost a quarter of all broadband internet traffic. CableLabs, a North American cable industry estimates that BitTorrent traffic is 35% of all internet traffic. To combat BitTorrent traffic, ISPs are now using new ways to filter out BitTorrent traffic by disabling the ability to upload data to other peers. Organizations would greatly benefit from this technology, because it is so low cost when talking about bandwidth and hosting. BitTorrent could be used to distribute files to members of the organization and even consumers. With BitTorrent, you don’t have to worry about hardware failures and loosing original files because it would be available to download again, because there are other copies of it still out there on the network or on the internet. I would rate it a 4/5 because of its ability to help distribute information and data worldwide to anyone that wants it, its low costs, very lightweight and ease of use, and it can let smaller companies who don’t have the bandwidth resources to compete with bigger ones.