Last week I spent some time playing around with various BitTorrent networks. My initial download speed was very poor, ~20 KB/sec. After hand optimizing the various parameters in a BitTorrent client I was able to achieve an average transfer rate in the order of 65 KB/Sec - respectful, but still not great. My various downloads were taking over 10 hours to complete.
Today I am downloading Windows Vista build 5536 (Pre-RC1, 2643 MB) through Microsoft's official download site - my average transfer rate is 650 KB/Sec, a full 10x increase over my best BitTorrent average speed. On iTunes, I am also able to achieve ~650 KB/sec downloading TV shows.
The key difference here, of course, is that a company using BitTorrent to distribute a file is not paying much for the data bandwidth, while both Microsoft and Apple, in the example above, are incurring huge bandwidth costs. You get what you pay for.
Cristiano Pierry
Technorati Tags: BitTorrent, Microsoft, Technology
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