50x Faster Than BitTorrent? Dream On!
Written by Ernesto on October 17, 2007Yesterday, quite a few websites, such as TechCrunch, quoted Kaiser Kuo, who claims that Blin.cn is working on a P2P-technology that is allegedly 50 times faster than our beloved BitTorrent. Impossible of course, and we will show you why.
First of all, if Kaiser Kuo’s claim is right this would mean that on average, BitTorrent users would use less than 2% of their available bandwidth when downloading. This is an absurd claim, because most people know that it’s fairly easy to max out your connection, even on a private tracker.
It gets even more hilarious if we look at the download speed Kaiser Kuo is bragging about. He tells us that it downloads 2.2% of a DVD quality episode of the TV-series “24″ in only 3 minutes. If we assume that he’s talking about the 700Mb DVD quality file, this means that he reached an average download speed of 88kB/s. I have no clue under what stone Kuo has been living, but 15.4Mb in 3 minutes is not going to impress many people.
TorrentFreak contacted Ashwin Navin, President and Co-Founder of BitTorrent Inc. When confronted with the 50 times faster than BitTorrent claim, he said: “BitTorrent can regularly saturate your downstream capacity, which in layman’s terms means BitTorrent is as fast as you can get. The claim is indicative of the fact that BitTorrent is the global standard for P2P transfers, against which all others are compared. BitTorrent DNA took that standard up significantly, but we don’t run around making sensationalist claims to get buzz.”
Indeed – a sensationalist claim – that’s what it is, nothing more, nothing less. Sure it might be possible to develop a P2P technology that is more efficient than BitTorrent, but the difference would never be bigger than a few percent. Even BitTorrent itself can’t be considered to be twice as fast as any other P2P technology, so claiming that any technology is 50 times faster is just a load of crap.
But wait, perhaps Kuo is talking about the time it takes until you can actually watch the episode. Their service supports streaming, and if you can watch the episode after 2% has downloaded this will mean it is 50x faster. However, this is not really revolutionary, the BitComet BitTorrent client implemented this feature over a year ago, and FoxTorrent has the same functionality.
On top of that, it is impossible to stream a episode of “24″ at the speeds Kuo is suggesting (88kB/s). If he did the math he would have realized that it will take more than 2 hours to download or stream the 45 minute episode, not something I would like to watch.
Last but not least, is the environment for P2P developers that great in China? Kuo says that the anti-piracy watchdogs such as the RIAA and MPAA hamper technological innovation in the US. However, BitTorrent Inc. does a great job with their p2p streaming implementation (beats Blin.cn), and Harvard is implementing the latest economical theories in their BitTorrent client.
Filed in the category: Tor-Rant
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79 Responses
Bwahahahaha.
dead straight, freaking chinese
lolwut? this article is made of load of crap.
You misunderstood a bit, he says it took 3 minutes from his wife started typing the url to the site, not started downloading. This means that the protocol probably is much like the BitTorrent DNA feature. Not more speed but streaming fast enought to watch the whole clip without catching up.
Actually, there is something faster then bit-torrent, which is, bittorent on a chinese connections. Apperently this guy forgets that China broadband is like 50 times faster then USA broadband, which in turn, makes bittorent faster. Wouldn’t it, the faster someone can upload to you the faster you can download something from BT
5 Oct 17, 2007 at 14:31 by crazyheiQuote crazyhei
Actually, there is something faster then bit-torrent, which is, bittorent on a chinese connections. Apperently this guy forgets that China broadband is like 50 times faster then USA broadband, which in turn, makes bittorent faster. Wouldn’t it, the faster someone can upload to you the faster you can download something from BT
—————————-
Actually Chinese lines aren’t as fully functional as American lines. If you want to discuss who has the fastest line on record, I strongly suggest you research the 40GB/s line in Sweden.
[quote comment="188932"]You misunderstood a bit, he says it took 3 minutes from his wife started typing the url to the site, not started downloading. This means that the protocol probably is much like the BitTorrent DNA feature. Not more speed but streaming fast enought to watch the whole clip without catching up.[/quote]
That makes sense. However, it is still not different from the other BitTorrent streaming implementations, and certainly not faster than BitTorrent. He’s comparing streaming with downloading, which makes no sense.
Like Ashwin said, they use the BitTorrent buzzword just to get some media attention, and it worked.
Not saying its true, just keep in mind there average connection speed is 100mbit. United stats average is 3mbit I think… If I’m wrong correct me but I know there average is 100mbit.
[quote comment="188976"]Not saying its true, just keep in mind there average connection speed is 100mbit. United stats average is 3mbit I think… If I’m wrong correct me but I know there average is 100mbit.[/quote]
But that says nothing about Bittorrents effectivness as a protocol which is what he’s talking about in the video. 50 times faster then bittorrent must mean the protocol, and not the bandwidth. Remember this is a guy that’s supposed to know his stuff. He’s not making the argument that China has better broadband.
He never mentions the protocol. He states that one network is faster than the other. If most of the users have 100mbit connection over most having a 3mbit connection than yes its going to be faster. It has nothing to do with BT’s protocol, its just the tool resides mostly with Chinese users and they have bigger connections. I don’t think he was trying to say that the Protocol is better than BT’s that is why it’s faster.If so there would be no one thinking what I have.
My reaction watching this video was similar to yours: it’s bullshit and shows a lack of technical understanding of how BT and file sharing protocols in general work.
However, in his defense I interpreted his little anecdote as referring to an entire season of 24 (he says “Season 6 of 24″), not a single episode. So the math probably adds up in terms of being able to stream and watch in real time.
That is all I was trying to say is when you have bigger files 100mbit connection is going to out perform 3mbit easily. Thus making it faster. Has nothing to do with the protocol just peoples connections in china.
[quote comment="188993"]If most of the users have 100mbit connection over most having a 3mbit connection than yes its going to be faster. It has nothing to do with BT’s protocol, its just the tool resides mostly with Chinese users and they have bigger connections. [/quote]
He’s not compairing countries though he just states that it’s fifty times faster the bittorrent, so either he’s talking out of his as or he’s really bad at telling the story he’s trying to tell.
He’s not saying that China is has 50x faster p2p networks then the US. Or he could be saying that, but it’s not a very good argument for evaluating a p2p client. From what I got from it he’s trying to make the point that Blin.cn is much better at stealing network resources and is thus 50x faster.
If his wife was downloading the whole season 6 of 24 we have to opposite effect. If that’s the case the client needs to download half an episode before it can start streaming. And that is not really that impressive.
I think anyone geeky enough to watch that already knew this and can deduce what he meant. Then again maybe I’m wrong and he’s just a big ass. Not what I got out of it though. I see what your saying as well.
He says 50 X faster than bittorrent.
Nothing to do with line speeds at all, as bittorrent on a 100mb/s line can potentially operate at 100mb/s.
He’s claiming something that is impossible.
Nothing can always be 50 times faster than something that maxes out your bandwidth.
Perhaps it is faster than BT in some instances, for example where there are many peers and only a few low bandwidth seeds, but then any high bandwidth streaming server would be faster.
In situations where seed bandwidth exceeds peer bandwidth, nothing can be faster.
In fact, single seed to single peer is a much faster way for me to transfer files to my servers than FTP, as it uses my full upload capacity. FTP uses only about 2/3rds.
“Web 2.0″ should have given the game away though. Those guys like to use fancy words and pretend they are doing something new, when it’s all just reworking what the rest of us have done for years, but with thousands of code lines invested in parsers and 10 times the bandwidth requirements.
AJAX? Flash with dynamically generated flashvars or even csv was working years ago. User generated content? Forums/blogs/journals/homepages, hell, even newsgroups and BBS, all old school.
He could of descoverd some new way to do compression at at 50:1 ratio…. given that video is already seriously uber compressed that would be pretty impressive…
so I seriously don’t thinks so!
Surely he’s just been hitting the same Demonoid torrents as me?
Y’know the ones with a sole seeder who’s trying to push out 6 dvds on a capped ADSL connection?
Mind you, walking across town to watch the movie at a friend’s house would be 50x faster than some Demonoid torrents…
Huh, interesting.
So if China gets ~100 mbs (wierd), and we get ~3 mbs (ah well), then that’s a discrepancy of about 50x.
So, their bandwidth is 50x faster,
but he claims its their protocol which is 50x faster.
get it?
On a different note, I can see Japan having awesome broadband, but China?!? Can anybody post a link that verifies the numbers for typical Chinese bandwidth?
Has anyone here considered the fact that you’re taking the “50x” claim a little too literally? Maybe he just meant “a lot faster”? As in, when you say “this cola is a thousand times better if you cool it”, you don’t literally mean a factor of 1000?
If he is saying he downloads illegally, why then, is he not being pursued by our hate agencies(RIAA
Weird..it cut off half of my comment…… I was trying to say maybe the MPAA or RIAA should go after him if he has openly admitted to downloading copywritten material… In fact I invite a challenge for them to go after him…But they wont…Y??? Prolly because they’re all in bed with each other trying to catch other ppl downloading…Just a thought.
now that it was questionable, next step is to prove us wrong or shut up.
BT Saturating your bandwidth isn’t proof that nothing can be faster.
Of course you’re right that the claims made are false.
However, the fact bittorrent [or anything else] saturates your bandwidth doesn’t mean that something else couldn’t be faster.
Why? Overhead. Not all the data you get and send is the actual file.
I’m nit picking, because obviously BT isn’t that inefficient either, but nevertheless it isn’t 100% effecient either and merely stating “saturated downstream” as a reason nothing else can be faster incorrectly suggests it is.
Raped
OK, obviously the author doesn’t know p2p from a hole in the ground. A p2p protocol isn’t measured by its bandwidth usage. It’s measured by its efficiency. Take napster for instance. At it’s peak, napster users used 60% of thier bandwith sending administrative packets so only 40% was available for actually transferring music. 50X faster isn’t going to happen because no modern protocol is only 2% efficient. Saying that your connection is maxed is meaningless.
You have something very wrong in your final graf: “China still has the record for jailing the first BitTorrent user.”
Incorrect. That was actually Hong Kong that prosecuted a fellow for sharing on BitTorrent, which is completely different than Beijing/PRC legal system for doing so. One country, two very different systems.
He did say his wife was downloading an entire season… the entire second paragraph is wrong. stop flaming him and watch the goddamn video.
[quote comment="189234"]Saying that your connection is maxed is meaningless.[/quote]
Agreed, but it’s enough to refute the 50x faster claim. The main reason why I wrote this is to let people know that it’s a lot of buzz about nothing. As of now, the BitTorrent protocol is one of the most efficient protocols out there.
50 times faster… if you run the numbers right…
..you ever been on a fresh torrent with 1 seed? it’s slow as heck! I could easily believe that this technology is 50 times faster when dealing with vast seed:peer ratios…
Even on an established torrent… i rarely see 15 megs in the first 5 minutes… it always takes time to get up to speed… it tends not to get any good bandwidth till it’s seeding… but it can’t seed till it’s got some segments that it got from the bandwidth it doesn’t have!
[quote comment="189236"]You have something very wrong in your final graf: “China still has the record for jailing the first BitTorrent user.”
[/quote]
Agreed & corrected
mpaa /riaa and other anti piracy organazations paid torrentfreak to discredit this man .
Speed comparison, check http://www.speedtest.net
There you got numbers from all over the globe.
[quote comment="189248"]50 times faster… if you run the numbers right…
..you ever been on a fresh torrent with 1 seed? it’s slow as heck! I could easily believe that this technology is 50 times faster when dealing with vast seed:peer ratios…
Even on an established torrent… i rarely see 15 megs in the first 5 minutes… it always takes time to get up to speed… it tends not to get any good bandwidth till it’s seeding… but it can’t seed till it’s got some segments that it got from the bandwidth it doesn’t have![/quote]
When a fresh torrent starts obviously the speed of the entire swarm is limited by the uploadspeed of the initial seeder. No amount of protocol is going to change that fact.
If that’s true, there’ll be another site called BlinFreak dot com :P
I live in China (Beijing) and our ADSL speeds are not particularly fast at all. You might be confusing China with Japan and Korea which in fact do have much higher speed broadband than the US. The top speed ADSL available in Beijing is 2M for about $23 per month.
someone previously said it’s possible to sail around the world before Columbus, or go to the moon before there was NASA, or have 100Mb LAN before there was the Gigabit ethernet. i’m sure that someone got the same flak from people like the majority, the masses, those who are too afraid to think there might be something better out there and that other people might end up getting the better stuff before they do. you probably weren’t around in the days when the nearest thing to P2P was dial-up to a BBS. it’s kinda irritating to people like us who actually know someting to hear people like you saying stuff as if you actually knew what were talking about.
why would u waste your time even making an article about this…you’ve just been trolled
If his wife is hot, then I believe everything he says.
Lol!!
I live i Belgium and have an internetconnection with 20Mb speed. Using usenet, it only takes me 5 to 6 min to download an episode of a serie (350Mb). BT however is really slow, only speeds up to 80kb or even less. And with usenet I’m not wasting bandwidth on uploading when I don’t want to, can’t say that of BT
In theory, Quantum Mechanics would allow for faster speeds than bittorrenting, but we will need quantum computers to make that a reality.
I frequently hit 150-300kb/s on popular torrents, but occasionally I’ve gone as high as 650kb/s.
This is from a FIOS connection going from a wireless router, through a wireless booster, to the computer (using utorrent). I have an old booster that maxes at only half the DL bandwidth my connection offers, but since I’m not the only computer on the network, that’s a good thing
What’s that other quote..
“64% of statistics are made up on the spot”
He probably just said 50x faster like someone might say it was a gazillion times faster.. Just made it up on the spot.
>> BT however is really slow, only speeds up to 80kb or even less.
It seems you download from the wrong trackers. ;)
Average connection speed in China is about 256 k down / 128 k up. (yea, the top is 8meg, but it is not for sale. Highest available down is 256k at least in my living area (Jing An)
The market is dominated by large state connection enterprises, the prices are expensive and outside china connection horrible due to the great firewall.
General population can reach 25k /s down-up on bittorrent from abroad.
If one downs from the fastest _local_ sources, the top is about 180k /s.
Oh yea, if somebody didnt get it:
I think this story is one of these bulls**t marketing poofs by the all so reliable and truthful Chinese.
Imagine China in a future with half billion computers using some p2p program… That would be like a LAN party ;)
BLIN is actually a plugin that contains rootkit and adware. Would you really install such a piece of crap on your computer.
Could someone in Chengdu or Shenzen please do a side by side test to settle this question? I went to the blin site and got bummed when they asked for US$ not RMB….
Thx.
If you really want speed, just move to Japan. Kind of expensive living there, but I’ve heard from a few sources, including friends who went there, that you can get up to 100GB/s fiber-in-the-house connections. Japan even made the news a little while back when a business strung multiple fiber-optic cables between it’s two main sites and managed 1TB/s transfers between them.
Agreed that bit torrent is efficient and likely no difference in the protocol. But anyone every considered the difference in seeders? (hit 2MB+/sec (from within china (shanghai))) ; )
100 million potential seeders == potentially dead hard drives ; )
haha, agree with you martin. a very serious lan party
You’r all way to obsessed with kb/s (or in som cases MB/s ;p) to see what this guy is realy saying.
What he’s just trying to say is that downloading 2% at steady speed is 50x faster then downloading 100% at the same speed (like if you max your connection) Wich really is kinda obvious.
In other words instead of waiting 50 min for a torrent to finish (don’t focus on the number, i bet some of you will claim to be able to download dvd’s in secounds….) do you only need to wait 1 min and the rest will stream while you watch.
Basicly what he’s talking about is P2P streaming….
lol guys, he says its 50 times faster because his wife could start watching the film after 2% was done, compared to bittorrent where you have to download 100% percent before you can start watching the movie.(excuse my bad grammar but i think i made my point.)
There are physical limitations with any medium.
wait but doesn’t bittorrent download the pieces of a torrent randomly? so streaming on bittorrent isn’t really ideal. even vuze has a streaming service IIRC. but if you’re STREAMING dvd quality VIDEO, then that means that if you are actually downloading(which would be stupid if you’re streaming the thing) then it would have to download piece by piece making it more ideal for video and MP3’s too probably. however for apps and games it’s pointless.
to put it a better way, think about it like youtube for pirated “DVD quality video”. if the protocol has limitations, like youtube, i don’t know though :[
“It’s fairly easy to max out your connection, even on a private tracker”
Sorry,isn’t it the other way round?
We need anonymous and encrypted secure p2p network, not a new fast one
[quote comment="188938"]Actually, there is something faster then bit-torrent, which is, bittorent on a chinese connections. Apperently this guy forgets that China broadband is like 50 times faster then USA broadband, which in turn, makes bittorent faster. Wouldn’t it, the faster someone can upload to you the faster you can download something from BT[/quote]
I agree the above words that I am a Chinese and I had experienced a download speed of over 3MB/s with using BitTorrent in China. That means I can download 180MB in one minute, and people can download a 700MB file with only take 4 minutes or less if it has enough seeds and dowloaders.
He-he – in his video he has the same wallpaper as your website…
chineese stay out of our way, and keep making our products for cheap….mmmk?
It’s acturally not true saying that North Amercia’s avg internet connection’s slower than china’s. Although you just find isps providing up to 25mb/s dl max. In china it’s common for isps to lie about the connetion. I know this because i tried the connections in china when i was on vacation there. My friend told me he had a 100mb/s connection, but it turned out i can’t even dl anything faster than 50kb/s(http). The thing he’s talking about is like youtube, but diffrent(it’s a program that requires installing). There’s several of these programs going around as a fad in china such as pplive,ppstream,etc. They DO NOT produce dvd quality streaming videos. INFACT it’s so crappy that it looks even worse than 60mb rmvb files(these 60mb rmvb files looks preety clean even if it’s 60mb). I can only imagine that they made the videos so crappy that the original resolution is probably 320×168 or something like that-.-. When it was in full screen mode it was blurry as hell.
[quote comment="189535"]BLIN is actually a plugin that contains rootkit and adware. Would you really install such a piece of crap on your computer.[/quote]
Can you verify this?
[quote comment="189621"]In other words instead of waiting 50 min for a torrent to finish….you only need to wait 1 min and the rest will stream while you watch.
Basicly what he’s talking about is P2P streaming….[/quote]
Exactly! In fact, he refers to is as “progressive downloads.” He further clarifies, “They’re not exchanging anything, what they’re doing is watching pirated videos.”
The author of this article is comparing apples and oranges.
[quote comment="188946"]5 Oct 17, 2007 at 14:31 by crazyheiQuote crazyhei
Actually Chinese lines aren’t as fully functional as American lines. If you want to discuss who has the fastest line on record, I strongly suggest you research the 40GB/s line in Sweden.[/quote]
In Japan and Korea, you can have 50mb/s or even 100 mb/s lines for about 70 USD/months.
Oh BTW, it’s not 40GB/s, it;s actually 40 Gb/s—- as in gigaBITS
[quote comment="192875"]It’s acturally not true saying that North Amercia’s avg internet connection’s slower than china’s. Although you just find isps providing up to 25mb/s dl max. In china it’s common for isps to lie about the connetion. I know this because i tried the connections in china when i was on vacation there. My friend told me he had a 100mb/s connection, but it turned out i can’t even dl anything faster than 50kb/s(http). The thing he’s talking about is like youtube, but diffrent(it’s a program that requires installing). There’s several of these programs going around as a fad in china such as pplive,ppstream,etc. They DO NOT produce dvd quality streaming videos. INFACT it’s so crappy that it looks even worse than 60mb rmvb files(these 60mb rmvb files looks preety clean even if it’s 60mb). I can only imagine that they made the videos so crappy that the original resolution is probably 320×168 or something like that-.-. When it was in full screen mode it was blurry as hell.[/quote]
Not exaxtly lying…. The ISPs sometimes don’t mention the distance factor.
I live in Japan and have a 50 Mbps line, but I can only download at maximum speed of 2.5-3 Mbps because my home is 4 KM away from the nearest data center.
Pulling shit outta his ass is right.. if it is the fact that chinese internet is faster then why would the retard be trying to friggin sport the new site so much.. as im assuming none of us on this site are downloading in china? right.. were doomed already aparently.. i think bittorrent is fine..
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Hell I hit my max speed on my 1.5 downlink for a while at times, but that’s reasonably rare because of the distances involved normally.
And maybe he discovered Rodney MacKay’s compression codec from Stargate: Atlantis. That had some pretty amazing compression on it supposedly. ;-) About the only way my downloads could be 50X faster, even right now I’m getting just under half my max speed on a download.
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Yeah what he is saying is that he is downloading a whole season of 24 wich are typically 6.5gb, so what he is saying is that he’s wife downloaded around 145mb instead of 15mb! Which even I must say is impressive!
[quote comment="188897"]Bwahahahaha.[/quote]
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you punks need to learn that in this world nothing is free. You little rats got to understand you cant just use torrent files cos thats just stealing and stealings agaisnt the law.
asswipes
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