How to blow your bandwidth
Source: Globe Technology
What's the fastest way to eat up bandwidth? Do absolutely nothing with your computer, it seems — as long as you keep running a peer-to-peer file-sharing program.
All you have to do to blow your monthly download limit with Sympatico or Videotron is to leave your computer running with a P2P file-sharing program turned on and some files to share. Don't surf, don't pick up e-mail and don't download a single file. You'll exceed Sympatico's 5-gigabyte limit within two or three weeks.
So says Marc Morin in a paper released the other day called The Effects of P2P on Service Provider Networks. Mr. Morin is chief technology officer at Sandvine Inc., a network-equipment maker based in Waterloo, Ont. His company has measured exactly how much P2P technology is influencing the Internet.
We were all wrong, he says, when we tried to calculate P2P traffic by adding up the size of the MP3 files we were swapping.
The real problem is the peer-to-peer software itself: The two main P2P networks, Kazaa and Gnutella, now make up an astonishing proportion of all Internet traffic, Mr. Morin says — about 40 to 60 per cent.
