Todd Beals puts out a nice monthly newletter on digital media and P2P. His latest issue looks at Bit Torrent. (BT) and its huge success.

Like any hot trend, there's been a lot of hype around BT, some of it not accurate. This article aims for an objective look to complement Beal's piece.

RazorPop supports Bit Torrent through our TrustyFiles software. TrustyFiles searches for torrents through P2 (Kazaa/Fast Track, Gnutella) or Google. TrustyFiles opens torrents and automatically starts downloads. RazorPop has a Bit Torrent user guide for users new to BT.

STATE OF THE ART.

• Market Leader. The popularity of BT has made it the consumer go-to network for large files, in particular TV shows, movies, and software.
• Size matters. The huge number of active users enhances the user experience with a high success rate of started and complated files for fresh files.
• Low fraud. While the BT architecture has its drawbacks (see Weaknesses below), its complexity can also be an advantage. There is virtually no fraud. In comparison, node-connected P2P networks (Fast Track, eDonkey, Gnutella, etc.) features both simplicity and relative anonymity. It's easy for intruders to share bogus files and to do so without consequence.
• Community management. BT does a nice job incenting good users and penalizing bad ones like leeches. It's not easy as it can be tricky to get it right with the right balance of incentives, make it seamless, and have it accepted by users.

PAR FOR THE COURSE.

• Efficiency. The ability to download any part of a file is a plus. But many other BT features are typical of other networks and software clients. These include uploading and downloading a file at the same time, partial file downloading, partial file uploading, and swarm downloading (downloading from multiple sources).
• Speed. I get similar fast multi-source downloads with speeds in excess of 100 kbps over DSL both for new torrents with BT and for hit music songs using TrustyFiles over Gnutella and Kazaa/Fast Track. The difference is not the network but typical file availability and size. The big files are on BT. I can download a 5MB song over Gnutella in seconds. But the 1GB movie over BT takes hours. That's a whole lotta bandwidth.

WEAK

• Availability. BT has a steep freshness factor. New files are easily available. Older files are especially difficult to download as there are not only are fewer users who want the files, but the tracker servers are increasingly unavailable. The success rate of finding and downloading files older than a few weeks is much higher in non-BT networks.
• Community sharing. I find it admirable that BT uses the philosophy that downloaded files also must be shared. We do the same with TrustyFiles. But BT's architecture dilutes this value. Older BT files typically have poor success rates connecting to trackers and so are unable to be shared. Compare this to node-connected P2P where users are always connected to the networks and sharing their files.
• Ease of use. The architecture of BT requires the user to use the browser, a second application, to find and download a torrent. The process requires several web clicks and web pages to search Google or directories for the torrent, register if required, download the file, and then click the file to start BT and downloading. In comparison non-BT clients require only one click to start a search and a second click to start downloading a returned match.

Marc Freedman
RazorPop, developer of TrustyFiles, the leading multiple network P2P file sharing software
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