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

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

[jbreckman]

Most of the time a mobile phone is sitting there, it isn't using it's antenna. What if something like the iPhone set up bandwidth sharing, so if there were a number of idle iPhones near you, and you were accessing a webpage, some traffic would get funneled through them and sent over wifi to you, making the whole experience MUCH faster. It would obviously only be over short bursts, and I'm not sure everyone would go for it, but it'd probably boost web browsing performance a lot. Almost like a torrent web browser... (I think thats why I thought of this right now)

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

[jbreckman]

Of course it'd hurt battery a little bit, but if done right, I don't think it would be too bad

I don't know how often a data connection is initiated during "stand by" mode on an iPhone, but you could piggy back onto that. Or - again I'm speculating here - I'm guessing theres probably some unused bandwidth while you are talking that it could piggy back onto. So you'd get a boost from anyone already using their cell.

Plus, in the true bittorrent sense, if you share your bandwidth, other people get their stuff faster, and if they follow the same rules, you'll get your stuff faster (and with less battery usage). So you'd REALLY only take a hit if you never used your iPhone to surf the web, but shared your connection with others.

Yeah, right

[Reality Master 101]

It ain't happening by Apple. Considering Apple made a deal with YouTube to convert all their videos to Quicktime, Apple is dead-set against allowing any industry standard CODECs on the iPhone. A bit torrent client would be totally useless on the iPhone -- nothing that I encounter is ever in Quicktime.

Now, if and when hackers get some reasonable CODECs on the iPhone, then we'll be talkin'. Though, those same hackers will get bit torrent running on the iPhone as well, so I don't think we'll need to wait for Apple anyway.

Re:You think ISPs think bittorrent is evil, try WI

[burris]

They can't cache it either, because so many uses are copyright violations and the protocol is not designed to be friendly to transparent caches. You could make up a cache, but you'd basically have to do a LOT of work with an IDS and a custom cache for a cache which will require many MANY terabytes of disk and that will get you sued if you deploy it.

In the USA at least, ISPs running automatic caches on behalf of their users are protected from secondary infringement liability by the DMCA.

BitTorrent implemented caching extensions and there was at least one company producing caches for BT and other p2p protocols but it didn't seem to go anywhere.