Microsoft Windows Update and Network Bandwidth?

Brett Glass asks: "As we reviewed the cache statistics for our small ISP today, we noted that the traffic generated by Microsoft's Windows Update feature constituted 45% -- no, that's not a misprint -- of our total throughput. Because so many computers on the Internet run Windows, this massive resource drain occurs whenever Microsoft announces major security holes (as it did this week). The traffic could be greatly reduced, and service to users much improved, if the updates were cacheable at the ISP. But Microsoft has set up the service in such a way that the data can't be cached. (It's digitally signed, so inserting Trojans into the cache is virtually impossible; in any event, no more of an issue than intercepting the data stream.) Are others out there seeing the same pattern? How might Microsoft be convinced to make its updates cacheable, so as not to waste unthinkable amounts of bandwidth?"

Comments

Re:Would you all bitch if it was another vendor?

[schmink182]

No one's bitching. All the person is asking is whether there's a whether he can change Microsoft's mind. Nowhere does he insult MS. In fact, he states that there is a completely justifiable reason for not letting anyone cache the updates.
Just settle down, really. Maybe you should go to bed.

Re:Valid

[mbogosian]

Wouldn't it be nice if you could set up a caching proxy to establish a verification process with the items being cached from that server - that way the server could perform checksum verification on the file and approve the copy for distribution.

It seems that it could be an easy implementation. The proxy requests the file verification in, an XML-RPC request is returned from the server to perform the checksum, the resulting data is sent via SOAP, and approval is given or denied, causing the cache to be used or flushed.

Ahh, but then that would involve Reverse Engineering, which, as we know is now illegal.

Not to mention that this is approaching a P2P network, which as we know can only be used for piracy.

Sorry, we're all just going to have to live with this new "innovation" in bandwidth utilization.