Israeli ISP boosting speed of customer torrent downloads

20 Apr 2009 | 19.06 Europe/London

Throttling - or "traffic-shaping" as Internet Service Providers like to call it - is the usual route ISPs take to reduce BitTorrent traffic on their networks. But one Israeli ISP, Bezeq International, is taking the opposite approach: speeding up torrent transfers for its customers. It's hoping that'll have the same effect.

BitTorrent files are now thought account for around 40 per cent of all internet traffic. Many ISPs say torenteers slowing down Internet speeds for average web users - and that slowing down the hefty file transfers is the fairest way to deal with the problem. A wide range of British ISPs, including BT Broadband and TalkTalk, limit the amount of bandwidth available to the most resource demanding BitTorrent users.

But it's torrent transfers to outside of Israel that have been hurting Bezeq International most. Its response: to seed the most popular BitTorrent downloads in Israel from a high speed server - and only let its own customers reach them. This means not only that Bezeq's network traffic is reduced but also its users' files are downloaded a lot quicker. While TorrentFreak says Bezeq won't confirm how many of its customers are benefiting from the policy, the move has been seen as win-win for ISP and consumer.

However, while Bezeq's idea seems consumer friendly, it may earn it some copyright-crusading enemies. To date ISPs have managed to avoid being dragged into piracy law cases because they're seen as a passive agent in peer-to-peer file transferral. Although Bezeq doesn't actively control which files it seeds, anti-piracy groups like the MPAA and RIAA could see seeding alone to be aiding copyright infringement.

[ TorrentFreak ]