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

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

[peragrin]

How long do you think your battery would last under constant usage?

haven't you ever noticed the difference between stand by and talk times?

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.

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.

Re:Link

[Threni]

No one's seeding it. Some guy had 96.4% of the story but after a week gave up and got it on Soulseek.

What's the point?

[kieran]

Maybe I'm being dumb, but I don't see the point of this. Files sent to a mobile are relatively small, even in the case of video due to the size of the screen, and mobile bandwidth is expensive. Bittorrent, on the other hand, is designed to save bandwidth for the server, not the client.

It seems like a bad trade-off to save yourself cheap server bandwidth by spending expensive radio bandwidth.

Re:Why Not?

[risinganger]

Does it really matter what protocol is used to get the data? I would say so yes. Would you log on to a remote client over the internet with telnet anymore or would you sensibly use ssh? Slightly off topic as far as examples go but it should get the point across.

The BitTorrent protocol keeps connections open with multiple peers and periodic communication with a server. If I was mad enough to download a video or music file on my phone I certainly wouldn't want the phone spending the next several hours uploading on my behalf - the battery drain being a major factor. I think the BitTorrent protocol is fantastic. It is very efficient in using as much bandwidth as you can throw at it and serves its intended purpose of distributing the impact of serving large sets of data. There are more sensible protocols in existence though for devices such as phones.

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:Yeah, right

[peragrin]

Name one Industry standard Codec? quicktime is at least playable on linux, windows and OS X. unlike Say WMV where msft won't even release the specs for it, so OS X and linux users are out of luck period.

besides Youtube uses Flash video where the individual codec doesn't matter so much.

Re:Yeah, right

[pushing-robot]

From Wikipedia

In October 2005, Apple Inc began selling H.264-encoded videos over the Internet through their iTunes Music Store.[11] Initially selling just television series and music videos, they expanded in September 2006 to sell films. On May 30, 2007 Apple announced plans to integrate streaming of YouTube videos into the Apple TV. In a later interview, Apple VP David Moody revealed that all of YouTube's videos are going to be transcoded to H.264 for higher compatibility and quality on the Apple TV. Starting in June, YouTube will be automatically encoding all new uploads with H.264. Their intention is to have the entire video catalog available in H.264 this autumn. Apple's iPhone supports H.264 Baseline Profile, Levels 2.1 and 3, at resolutions up to 480x320 or 640x480 and bitrates up to 1.5 Mbit/s and is capable of playing the YouTube video content.[12]

Adobe will support H264 in its Flash Player [13].

So you're saying that H.264 isn't an industry standard? As opposed to Flash Video?

I guess Apple must have bought out Adobe as well, considering the next Flash Player will use (cough) "Quicktime".

Re:Why Not?

[Opportunist]

Does it really matter what protocol is used to get the data?

You're not a Comcast customer, obviously.

You think ISPs think bittorrent is evil, try WISPs

[nweaver]

ISPs think BitTorrent is incredibly evil, because from the ISPs viewpoint it is VERY inefficient... Bittorrent is not about efficient file distribution (thats called Akamai), rather Bittorrent is a way for someone to provide a large file cheaply, because it puts the bandwidth costs directly on the customers of the large file.

Unless the protocol has a significant number of simultaneous users for a given file within the ISP's local network, everything is actually transfered twice: once in, and once out. This isn't an efficiency savings, it is an efficiency hit, and a big one given the volume transferred.

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.

Likewise, for a mobile use, it will suck twice the power, as you send and receive EVERYTHING twice on your local link.

And wireless bandwidth is much more valuable than the commodity internet link (there is a lot less of it), so even if items ARE staying in the ISP, the double transfer problem is a huge issue unless you have a bunch of people getting the same file right next to each other.

Bittorrent in the mobile world saves the content provider from having to provide cheap, wired bandwidth by making the recipients and/or their WISPs provide expensive wireless bandwidth instead!

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.

Way ahead of its time.

[EddyPearson]

Ok, Its fairly clever, I'll grant you (Though, its not THAT tricky to code a BitTorrent client in Java), but with mobile data tariffs being what they are, whose actually going to use it?