New UDP uTorrent Takes Aim At Throttling > Is this a good thing for the net?

said by espaeth:

Broadband bandwidth is oversubscribed. Your "idle" bits are intended to be someone else's "used" bits. The difference here is again finite vs infinite duration transfers. You start a standard upload of that 400MB video to Grandma Ginny, walk away, and once your transfer finishes there is no more traffic on the network. Using a P2P application, on the other hand, will keep putting bits on the network for as long as you let the application run. Little Timmy queues up some MP3s to download in the morning before he goes to school -- even though the transfer will probably finish in the first 30-45 minutes, the P2P app will keep uploading to other P2P clients the entire time he's away at school, or even longer if he leaves the client running after he gets home.