[ale] comcast & bittorrent

[brian at polibyte.com (Brian Pitts)]

Jim Popovitch wrote:
> 
> Yes.  Sorta.  It takes X amount of resources to transfer Y file.  If the
> provider of Y is not spending X, then someone else is somewhere.

That would be the check we send our ISPs every month.

> Cable providers added caching proxies years ago to handle large and
> repeated downloads by their users... with BT the reverse situation
> occurs, that is lots of cable customers are providing the same (or
> pieces of the same) content on the upstream channel benefiting non-Cable
> customers.... and there is no way to reverse-cache this.  Why should
> Cable companies allow/support that?

There is at least one caching solution specifically tailored for 
Bittorrent. This slashdot thread discusses it, then proposes multicast 
as the real answer, and finally devolves into trucks vs. tubes jokes.

http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/08/07/214259

-Brian