BitTorrent's Battle for Bandwidth Intensifies

Thanks to a growing appetite among Web surfers for multimedia content, and a glut of music and videos to download, some ISPs are putting the kibosh on the free-flowing bandwidth party.

Comcast is among major ISPs that have begun targeting bandwidth-guzzling applications such as BitTorrent by limiting the amount of bandwidth accessible to those applications.

Comcast says it must take action in order to ensure that a handful of customers don't gobble up more than their fare share of bandwidth, slowing Internet speeds for others.

But companies such as BitTorrent are not happy fwith the way Comcast and other ISPs are singling them out and potentially threatening their business models. BitTorrent in particular has deals with Hollywood to distribute TV shows and movies using a version of its peer-to-peer (P-to-P, or P2P) technology and software. BitTorrent estimates that 150 million people use its technology.

"ISPs like Comcast want to throw the baby out with the bathwater," says Ashwin Navin, president and cofounder of BitTorrent.

Another company, Vuze, is similarly rattled. The company is petitioning the Federal Communication Commission to adopt regulations that prevent ISPs from interfering with P2P traffic. Vuze also has deals with media companies to distribute licensed content to consumers via the BitTorrent protocol.

BitTorrent is being singled out, but its issues are symptomatic of a larger challenge to ISPs, say several industry analysts. ISPs are being forced to be stingier with bandwidth in order to compensate for aging network infrastructures that can't keep up with consumer demand for bandwidth, says Rob Enderle, principal analyst with the Enderle Group. Calls seeking comment from several major ISPs were not immediately returned.

The BitTorrent protocol is also an easy target for ISPs because of its widespread use for pirating software and multimedia content. Unlike other bandwidth-intensive applications such as Xbox 360 consoles and sites such as YouTube, the open-source BitTorrent protocol has been implemented for use among illegal file sharers.

Too Good for Its Own Good?

BitTorrent's protocol is widely considered to be one of the most capable ways of distributing large data files across the Internet. It efficiently breaks files into many hundreds of pieces. When file swappers want to download a file, they may be downloading bits of the file from multiple sources. This distributed method best ensures the file's availability and reduces the amount of bandwidth necessary to upload a single file from a P-to-P user's PC. Someone who uses BitTorrent to download lots of movies, however, will use a lot of their ISP's bandwidth.

"It's unclear whether or not ISPs are blocking BitTorrent traffic to combat piracy or because of network issues," says Gilles BianRosa, CEO of Vuze. The company claims to have 12 million users of its Azureus Vuze software client for downloading licensed P-to-P files.

BianRosa says that during October Vuze delivered one million hours of high-quality video to users of its software. He says he has no idea how much illicit content was downloaded using his company's software client in the same time frame.

BigChampagne, a company that tracks file sharing, reports that at any given moment during the last week of October at least 92,461 digital files of top-100 movie titles were being downloaded to any one of a dozen BitTorrent software clients.

P-to-P Will Evolve, Expand

The growing chasm between companies that want to use BitTorrent to distribute licensed and copyright-free content on the one hand and illegal file swappers on the other is about to get a lot wider, says Justin Bunnell of TorrentSpy, a leading Web site for helping users find content (not always savory) among other BitTorrent users.

Bunnell says BitTorrent (the company) is trying to further distance itself from illegal file-sharing by making improvements to the BitTorrent protocol that will not be shared with the open-source community. In response, a faction of BitTorrent users wants to create a new protocol to replace BitTorrent, allowing them to be less dependent on the corporate technology.

This new protocol is called .P2P and could be released in early 2008 by a leading P-to-P Swedish Web site called The Pirate Bay that promotes trading of pirated content. This flavor of the BitTorrent protocol proposes to make it technologically harder for ISPs to block traffic and thus make it more difficult for antipiracy organizations to catch copyright violators.

"If BitTorrent loses its pirating masses, it loses consumer relevance," says John Barratt, director of research at market research firm Parks Associates. And that, he says, could hurt BitTorrent's standing with consumers as it begins to find success working with major media companies to distribute content.

Meanwhile, BitTorrent cofounder Navin says he is indifferent to what the pirate community does, noting he is more concerned about legitimate file sharing. Navin's centerpiece to his BitTorrent distribution system is its deal with Brightcove, an online distributor of video for CBS, Fox Entertainment Group, and Viacom. BitTorrent DNA is the company's platform for distribution of licensed content.

The Elephant in the Room: Bandwidth

The biggest issues facing both file-swapping pirates and companies seeking to legitimately distribute licensed content are "traffic shaping" and P-to-P blocking, according to a former network administrator for a major U.S. ISP. Traffic shaping is the method ISPs use to manage their bandwidth. The former network manager says ISPs have been shaping traffic (or slowing) bandwidth for years to varying degrees.

How much an ISP manages its bandwidth to customers is driven by regional circumstances, rather than an ISP implementing a blanket traffic-shaping policy across its entire network, according to the former network administrator. ISPs are more prone to shaping bandwidth in areas where they face less competition and have networks that are struggling to meet customer bandwidth demand, he says.

"Cable executives are very concerned about consumer criticism," says the former network manager. But from an ISP's point of view, bandwidth availability presents a two-pronged challenge. One prong is that ISPs must consider the significant cost of building their networks to increase bandwidth. The other prong is that they must manage bandwidth so customers maintain an acceptable level of download and upload speeds.

ISPs see bandwidth-hungry P-to-P operations as an easy target for conservation, especially since a significant volume of P-to-P traffic involves trading unlicensed music, movies, and software. So an ISP that announces it will limit P-to-P traffic to ensure overall network performance can also claim it is limiting such unlicensed trading, analysts say. Could they make the same case for slowing traffic to iTunes? Absolutely not, says BianRosa of Vuze.

BitTorrent and Vuze say they have had to "tweak" their protocols to get past the efforts of ISPs to slow P-to-P traffic. "It's a game of cat and mouse we have been playing for nearly a year," BianRosa says. He says there will always be more mice than cats.

ISPs Must Wake and Smell the Bandwidth

"ISPs don't want to spend money to upgrade their networks, so they have to limit the amount of bandwidth a customer can use," says Mike McGuire, an analyst with market research firm Gartner. He says things will get a whole lot worse for customers and ISPs before they get better.

McGuire recommends that ISPs adapt to a Web where bandwidth demands are huge and traffic travels both upstream and downstream. He says some ISPs don't want to acclimatize to an Internet full of customers with Web-based security cameras and home servers, customers who also want to share large multimedia files.

"Problems presented by P-to-P are going to grow tenfold in years ahead," McGuire says. "ISPs need to get with the program."

On the other hand, more bandwidth may beget more demand. As Enderle points out, "The more bandwidth you give people, the more they will find ways to use as much as they can."