After a lengthy and sometimes bitter confrontation, the two Internet giants BitTorrent and Comcast have agreed to work together on the issue of bandwidth management. As many BitTorrent users undoubtedly know, Comcast was accused last year of "delaying" BitTorrent uploads. This practice led to a frenzy of criticism, generated a political firestorm, and revived the debate on net neutrality.

Today's announcement, made by Comcast and BitTorrent, Inc., mitigates many of the concerns of mainstream BitTorrent users. According to the agreement, the new network management policy of Comcast will be "protocol agnostic". In other words, BitTorrent won't be the only target of bandwidth management; rather all heavy users, regardless of what program or protocol, will see their connection throttled. The current practice of resetting uploads for the average user appears to be over.

Additionally, Comcast received recognition from BitTorrent that bandwidth management is a necessary aspect of life for the ISP.

"While we think there were other management techniques that could have been deployed, we understand why Comcast and other ISPs adopted the approach that they did initially," Eric Klinker, BitTorrent's Chief Technology Officer said in the press release.

According to the announcement, Comcast will also upgrade its bandwidth capacity.

"Additionally, we plan to more than double the upstream capacity of our residential Internet service in several key markets by year end 2008. We plan to take advantage of multi-carrier technology to further increase upstream capacity for all of our broadband customers in advance of the full DOCSIS 3.0 roll out," said John Schanz, Comcast Cable's Executive Vice President of National Engineering and Technical Operations.

Interestingly, BitTorrent and Comcast announced a joint venture to work with other ISPs and technology firms to "explore and develop a new distribution architecture for the efficient delivery of rich media content." Isn't that what BitTorrent is supposed to do anyway?

So to recap, Comcast will stop targeting BitTorrent directly. Uploads will no longer be reset; however, if you're a prolific sharer, expect to be managed. BitTorrent effectively admitted that Comcast's policy was understandable, and the two will cooperate in creating a new network architecture for content delivery. Comcast recognizes that the Internet is changing rapidly, and ISPs must redevelop themselves to accommodate the massive influx of bandwidth consumption. BitTorrent in turn will retool their clients to optimize bandwidth efficiency on the restructured ISP network. What this retooling winds up looking like is anyone's guess, however transparency and documentation has been promised by BitTorrent.

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BitTorrent :: BitTorrent Inc.

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