On Mon, Sep 17, 2012 at 10:16 PM, Louis Suárez-Potts <[email protected]> wrote: > Meshing implicitly leads to participatory culture.
I disagree stongly. Seeding torrents is a bandwith-intensive, and particularly upstream-intensive proposition. Most residential broadband links -at least down here in .AR- are limited to 512K to 256 Kbps upstream speed. Only a minority has FTTH or DOCSIS 3.0 cable modems, and in those insteances upstream has an average on 1 Mbit. Torrenting -and particularly seeding- only starts to get interesting with upstream speeds above 1Mbit. On the other hand if you have 256 Kbps of upstream and suddenly you find yourself seeding a popular file to several users at once, you suddenly find that your ´broadband´ sucks, ie, you can´t send any big email attachment or upload files to the cloud because all your tiny upstream is being used by the torrents. -yes, one can fine-tune the bw allocation, but as I said above, with upstream speeds as low as 512K or 256K any fraction of a tiny pipe is an even tinier pipe. So, in the words of Vint Cerf "residential broadband connections are crippled" http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/1016487/home-broadband-customers-are-crippled-vint-cerf-reckons FC -- During times of Universal Deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act - George Orwell
