BitTorrent Taps 100mln Users to Compare Global ISP Performance

[nsane.forums]

New project taps 100 million monthly active users to compare download traffic, upload traffic, BitTorrent traffic, and HTTP traffic so it "can answer questions like: I live in this city in the world–it could be anywhere, literally anywhere–which ISP should I use?"

BitTorrent Inc. has been working on a network performance project that it says could harness the activity of more than 100 million monthly active users – 20 million per day – in order to provide a true picture of how ISPs stack up against one another.

The project comes on the heels of one carried out by Netflix earlier this year in which Charter came out on top and Clearwire ranked at the bottom of the list.

"The throughput we are able to achieve with these streams can tell us a great deal about the actual capacity our subscribers are able to sustain to their homes," said Ken Florance, Netflix' Director of Content Delivery.

With just under 20 million subscribers, the much larger pool of active BitTorrent mainline and uTorrent users could provide a much clearer picture of how ISPs stack up against one another, and it's something BitTorrent Inc. hints is in the works.

"We looked at Netflix's [data], and we thought, we can have some fun with this, because we have data that is miles better–miles, miles better," says Simon Morris, VP of products at BitTorrent. "We have download traffic, upload traffic, BitTorrent traffic, and we have HTTP traffic. So we can answer questions like: I live in this city in the world–it could be anywhere, literally anywhere–which ISP should I use? Which is the fastest? Which ISP is messing with BitTorrent traffic? Because we have this data, we can see the difference in speeds by time of day."

FastCompany was given an inside peek at what's in the works over at BitTorrent Inc. HQ and the possibilities look limitless. It can take a look at network performance by country on down to the tiniest of towns like Ramsey, Illinois.

"We have clients in every country in the world, seven days a week for the most part," added Eric Klinker, BitTorrent CEO. "We cache over 9,000 ISPs."

The data could prove fodder for Net Neutrality advocates here in the US and around the globe if given a clear indication of just how disparate their connection speeds are between ISPs, but Klinker insists the project is only for "helpful and constructive" purposes.

There's no mention of a release date for the data, or if it'll even be released at all, but one thing's for sure, and that's a reminder of just how large the BitTorrent community is.

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