By: MarkJ - 3 November, 2009 (7:59 AM) - Score: 1357 - Fixed Line Broadband, Piracy

Broadband ISPs in the UK may soon be able to start lifting restrictions on P2P (File Sharing) traffic thanks to a significant change being made to BitTorrent's uTP protocol. The update will effectively allow popular P2P clients, such as the forthcoming uTorrent 2.0, to restrict how much traffic they use when uTP detects that the ISPs network is becoming too congested.

Many Internet providers have adopted various Traffic Shaping and Management measures that specifically target P2P, which is usually as a result of a small proportion of customers using up a majority of bandwidth via file sharing clients for both legal and often illegal means (see yesterdays entanet news). But the new uTP update could change all that.


The new method works by measuring an ISPs latency performance which, without getting too techy, is the time is takes for a packet of data to go from the sender to the receiver over a network (i.e. from your computer to another etc.). High latency can be visualised in multiplayer Internet games becayse it results in odd stuttering effects, causing players to stutter around (lag).


Of course we cannot judge precisely how this will work in the real world until it is released out of beta and to all final BitTorrent based clients. Indeed high latency doesn't always mean that service speeds will be slower or lack bandwidth, it can be caused by other factors too, such as a general fault or ISP side restrictions.

However, without getting into the nitty gritty tech jargon (if you like that sort of stuff then read this), the enhanced uTP is probably not going to completely solve the "problem" of excessive P2P traffic eating up most of an ISPs bandwidth. However it might help a little.

UPDATE - 12:12pm

Added an extra quote to better explain how it works.