gene heskett wrote:
>> But I'd like to return the question. What's wrong with nntp? > > The sheer volume of traffic eats 99% of an ISP's bandwidth. I doubt that very much, particularly if the ISP drops the binary newsgroups. My ISP, Internode, has provided nntp for many years. For a while a few years back they dropped binary newsgroups, but thay have brought them back. They wouldn't do that if there wasn't a clear demand for it, and if they didn't believe that on the balance, providing free Usenet access to customers didn't pay for itself. These days, many big ISPs complain about bittorrent using up their bandwidth. I call shenanigans. That's like my local bottle shop complaining that 99% of their sales comes from wine, and that stocking all that wine takes away valuable shelf space that could be used for imported Romanian beers and Chinese whiskey (no offense to anyone who likes Romanian beer or Chinese whiskey). It's a nonsense claim -- if your customers want to use the bandwidth they're paying for on bittorrent, or any other protocol, what difference does it make to you? It's not like you have to install a second Interweb tube just for bittorrent, or that bittorrent packets cost more than HTTP packets. Fer fecks sake, the ISP doesn't even have to run a bittorrent server! It's practically free money to the ISP, packets go in, packets go out, they don't have to do a bloody thing with them. Now, an ISP might not have the bandwidth to supply all the needs of their customers, that's a separate issue. But complaining that the problem is specifically because they use bittorrent, as if it would disappear if they changed to HTTP, is bogus. -- Steven -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
