This morning we decided to do a Bittorrent experiment: one of our engineers uploaded the CST non-commercial ISO to S3, and invited people in the Smalltalk IRC channel to give the download a shot with a Torrent client.

Well. My download speed started out at an unimpressive 80 kbps, but - instead of improving as more people joined in, it dropped down to 2 kbps after a couple of minutes. Why? Well, I have to assume that this report from last summer is still accurate:

It is reported that Comcast is using an application from Sandvine to throttle BitTorrent traffic. Sandvine breaks every (seed) connection with new peers after a few seconds if it’s not a Comcast user. This makes it virtually impossible to seed a file, especially in small swarms without any Comcast users. Some users report that they can still connect to a few peers, but most of the Comcast customers see a significant drop in their upload speed.

The funny thing is, Bittorrent has "gone legit" as it were - on their site, there are all sorts of ads for legal torrent downloads - most of which are useless for Comcast users. I think there is a reason to switch to Verizon after all...

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