Pirates of the Indian Ocean
Even though Netflix landed a few months ago in India, other services like HBO Now, Spotify, Pandora, Hulu and many others are still not available here. This, along with a not-so-strict enforcement of digital laws, has made piracy rampant in India. But from a networking point of view, ISPs have never liked their users downloading GBs of data via torrents. The reason is simple – load on the bandwidth. Since the Internet infrastructure is still not as good as the Western/Asian counterparts, Indian ISPs have struggled dealing with this issue and finding any solution. Till now.
ISPs-Torrents: Brotherly Love!
Since pirating anything in India via torrents is almost impossible to stop, some ISPs have realized that a better solution is to provide their own local P2P engine. Even though some of these ISPs have had their own caching services earlier, this is the first time they’ve all tied up with a service like Torbox. It may not be well known elsewhere, but if you’re lucky then your ISP is already in a tie-up with Torbox to provide you with better download speeds. If not (like me), well – hard luck!
Like Torrents, But Different
Torbox uses the same principle of torrenting, but has a few key differences. For one, it is based on ‘network proximity’ technology – relying on files that it can find closest to you, in your network. Torbox explains – Downloads take place through regular torrent clients but torrent swarms often connect to dedicated “cache peers” which assist in speeding up the entire process. The actual peering is handled by other services, such as Extreme Peering, which is operated by Extreme Broadband Services (EBS).
Hit or Miss?
Is your ISP one of the listed ones above? Or are you ruing shifting to another ISP because of limited download speeds? In either case, we’d like to know your opinion on the whole piracy saga in India and if this feels like a right move. Meet us in the comments section. ALSO READ: BitTorrent Sync vs Infinit: The Battle Of The Personal P2P Syncing Services
