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uTorrent To Build In Transfer-Throttling Ability
vintagepc writes "TorrentFreak reports that a redesign of the popular BitTorrent client uTorrent allows clients to detect network congestion and automatically adjust the transfer rates, eliminating the interference with other Internet-enabled applications' traffic. In theory, the protocol senses congestion based on the time it takes for a packet to reach its destination, and by intelligent adjustments, should reduce network traffic without causing a major impact on download speeds and times. As said by Simon Morris (from TFA), 'The throttling that matters most is actually not so much the download but rather the upload – as bandwidth is normally much lower UP than DOWN, the up-link will almost always get congested before the down-link does.' Furthermore, the revision is designed to eliminate the need for ISPs to deal with problems caused by excessive BitTorrent traffic on their networks, thereby saving them money and support costs. Apparently, the v2.0b client using this protocol is already being used widely, and no major problems have been reported."
uTorrent has always had very fine control over how much bandwidth you used, per-torrent and overall.
All this does is move the throttling the ISPs used to do for no reason to the user's computer to do for no reason. It's a myth that BitTorrent causes a lot of strain on networks - it's multicast streaming like Hulu and Pandora that really do a number on their networks.
But Hulu and Pandora aren't used to download illegal things (never mind MediaFire, Rapidshare, surfthechannel and their brethren handling illegal multicast quite well.)
Oh wait - that's how everyone pirates stuff since they started cracking down on p2p.