Research Concludes: "BitTorrent is Good for Tier1 ISPs"

 

A new report  by John S. Otto, Mario A. Sánchez, David R. Choffnes, Fabián E. Bustamante (pictured) from Northwestern University and Georgos Siganos from Telefónica Research  presents a comprehensive view of BitTorrent - "using data from a representative set of 500,000 users sampled over a two year period, located in 169 countries and 3,150 networks".

See "On Blind Mice and the Elephant - Understanding the Network Impact of a Large Distributed System" - here and below.

In their conclusions, the authors say that "We found that despite its global reach, BitTorrent is able to remain local for large portions of its traffic. Further, our results show that most traffic generated by BitTorrent users stays at or below tier 3 .. Most BitTorrent traffic flows over cost-free paths and that it generates substantial revenue potential for many higher tier ISPs. We also highlighted the importance of the temporal pattern behind the generated traffic under the common 95th-percentile charging model"