Coming Soon, Mobile Torrents

explosivejared writes "ZDNet is running an article on the "mobile implementation of the bittorent protocol which says 'Mobile implementations of the BitTorrent protocol are nearly certain to be part of whatever Google Android comes up with, and if not someone will have one for the open platform straightaway. Already a Windows Torrent product is on Version 2.0, and given the video capability of the iPhone it's clear Apple is not going to let this opportunity pass by. A Symbian Torrent program is on Version 1.3."

Comments

TFA

[funfail]

http://blogs.zdnet.com/open-source/?p=1742

Re:Sort of off-topic, but I just thought of it

[The Mad Debugger]

You are extremely wrong. :)

Usually phones don't do much of anything when they wake from sleep, especially if they haven't moved. The details vary from protocol to protocol, but normally they wake up only enough to listen for pages from the base stations, and then for only *very* brief periods. This is one of the basic challenges of modern cell network design: making sure the radio access network and the mobile have their clocks sync'd enough that the network knows when the phone will be listening.

This is a huge part of making the battery life what it is. There's no "transmission" to piggback off of for battery life reasons, or if there is, it's as brief as possible to save battery life and bandwith. You wouldn't want that common signaling channel to be flooded with bit torrent traffic anyway!

P2P on a 2G or 3G cellphone is just dumb. The total bandwidth of a given cellsite is limited to some fairly small number, and trying to run P2P is just going to make a lousy experience for everyone. Maybe with some 4G tech, the story would be different, but right now, if you really need to go download some crap off P2P do it at home.