This is why your net connection is so slow

By James Rivington

September 20th 2007 | Tell us what you think [ 0 comments ]

Could this season of TV in the US noticeably reduce internet speeds?

" It is a cliché that most clichés are true, but then likemost clichés, that cliché is untrue" - Stephen J Fry, 1997.

As I write this, I'm sitting at home on my day off, cursingvery loudly at my home internet connection. Just how can ISPs get away with promising8Mb broadband and only deliver a fraction of the promised speed?

ISPs don't deliver what they promise: and this is,unfortunately, one of those overused clichés which is actually true.

Until recently I had the blame entirely in the court of BT Broadbandand other such infuriating internet service providers. However, having ponderedthe idea in more detail recently, I have decided that it might not be the ISPsfault after all. And slightly worryingly, we might only have ourselves toblame.

Slow broadband?

Yesterday, we wrote a story which layed bare the cold, hard facts.

When an ISP says you'll have an 8Mb connection, it assumesthat you won't be maxing out that connection all the time. And in theory, this model works -on the odd occasion when you might need to download something very quickly, the8Mb/s speed would be there for you.

But when you've got oodles of nefarious bandwidth banditsmaxing out their connections 24/7, that leaves less bandwidth for the rest ofus. And the more people who do it, the less bandwidth there is to go around.

The problem is bigger than you probably think it is, and the blame lays with bittorrent. Using bittorrent clients,people can download practically any TV show episode and any movie for free andat very high speeds. People do it too, in their millions.

The bittorent effect

And here's the thing: with the fall TV season about to startin the US, bittorrent networks are going to be draining the web at speedsof around 7GB every second. And that's just the people downloading US TV shows;it's not including the vast quantity of movies, music and porn which are alsobeing zapped across the web at astronomic velocities.

7GB per second. That's 4.2 petabytes a week. In other words:imagine over 4.2 million gigabytes of TV show data being piped across theinternet every seven days. In megabytes, that's 42 with eight zeros after it. It's the equivalent of a billion MP3s or 890,400 DVD-quality movies

There is no doubt: if it wasn't for that, all our internet connectionswould be much faster. Bittorrent traffic already accounts for as much as 90per cent of all internet bandwidth usage. And that's a shocking waste.

Never has so much been owed by so few, to so many.

Read the full, shocking story.

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