Coming Soon, Mobile Torrents

explosivejared writes "ZDNet is running an article on the "mobile implementation of the bittorent protocol which says 'Mobile implementations of the BitTorrent protocol are nearly certain to be part of whatever Google Android comes up with, and if not someone will have one for the open platform straightaway. Already a Windows Torrent product is on Version 2.0, and given the video capability of the iPhone it's clear Apple is not going to let this opportunity pass by. A Symbian Torrent program is on Version 1.3."

Link

[saibot834]

And where is the link to the story?

Re:Link

[Threni]

No one's seeding it. Some guy had 96.4% of the story but after a week gave up and got it on Soulseek.

Re:

[siddesu]

there you go:

http://blogs.zdnet.com/open-source/?p=1742 [zdnet.com]

the rest of the links are in there.

Worst summary ever

[Constantine XVI]

A) I have no clue what the hell TFS is about
B) I know we're not supposed to read TFA, but at least give us one!

TFA

[funfail]

http://blogs.zdnet.com/open-source/?p=1742 [zdnet.com]

Sort of off-topic, but I just thought of it

[jbreckman]

Most of the time a mobile phone is sitting there, it isn't using it's antenna. What if something like the iPhone set up bandwidth sharing, so if there were a number of idle iPhones near you, and you were accessing a webpage, some traffic would get funneled through them and sent over wifi to you, making the whole experience MUCH faster. It would obviously only be over short bursts, and I'm not sure everyone would go for it, but it'd probably boost web browsing performance a lot. Almost like a torrent web browser... (I think thats why I thought of this right now)

Re:Sort of off-topic, but I just thought of it

[peragrin]

How long do you think your battery would last under constant usage?

haven't you ever noticed the difference between stand by and talk times?

Re:

[jbreckman]

Of course it'd hurt battery a little bit, but if done right, I don't think it would be too bad

I don't know how often a data connection is initiated during "stand by" mode on an iPhone, but you could piggy back onto that. Or - again I'm speculating here - I'm guessing theres probably some unused bandwidth while you are talking that it could piggy back onto. So you'd get a boost from anyone already using their cell.

Plus, in the true bittorrent sense, if you share your bandwidth, other people get their stu

Re:Sort of off-topic, but I just thought of it

[The Mad Debugger]

You are extremely wrong. :)

Usually phones don't do much of anything when they wake from sleep, especially if they haven't moved. The details vary from protocol to protocol, but normally they wake up only enough to listen for pages from the base stations, and then for only *very* brief periods. This is one of the basic challenges of modern cell network design: making sure the radio access network and the mobile have their clocks sync'd enough that the network knows when the phone will be listening.

This is a huge part of making the battery life what it is. There's no "transmission" to piggback off of for battery life reasons, or if there is, it's as brief as possible to save battery life and bandwith. You wouldn't want that common signaling channel to be flooded with bit torrent traffic anyway!

P2P on a 2G or 3G cellphone is just dumb. The total bandwidth of a given cellsite is limited to some fairly small number, and trying to run P2P is just going to make a lousy experience for everyone. Maybe with some 4G tech, the story would be different, but right now, if you really need to go download some crap off P2P do it at home.

Re:

[threephaseboy]

Except that as your parent stated, the phone is not even listening all the time when it's on standby

Re:

[hax0r_this]

And if you really feel the need to do so, get an ssh client on your phone and use a command line torrent client on your home computer.

That solves the whole storage issue too (not too many phones with built in hard drives last I checked).

Then if you really feel the need to get at your media from your phone before you can sync it via USB, bluetooth or whatever else you might use then stream it. You can set your computer to transcode video to a low resolution on the way up to save bandwidth, and since you'll b

Re:

[tlhIngan]

Usually phones don't do much of anything when they wake from sleep, especially if they haven't moved. The details vary from protocol to protocol, but normally they wake up only enough to listen for pages from the base stations, and then for only *very* brief periods. This is one of the basic challenges of modern cell network design: making sure the radio access network and the mobile have their clocks sync'd enough that the network knows when the phone will be listening.

To put this in numbers, since I've ha

Re:

[ILuvRamen]

forget the battery, how long do you think your mobile carrier would keep you on with constant data usage. Currently you pretty much have to "be there" to use mobile phone bandwidth. Like I have to be sending a picture or downloading something with the phone open and in my hands. I used like 9 MB in a month. With bittorrent nobody just sits there and watches it so you can use maxed out bandwidth off the tower pretty much 24/7 in theory. And I remember a story here about how all cell phone companies can

Re:

[Christophotron]

No offense, but I think that's just a bad idea for many reasons. There are plenty of phones out there that support 3G or better, so why not just get one of those phones if you need to browse faster instead of using the iphone and its outdated technology. Or if you just love the iphone so much, either live with its inherent slowness or wait for a better iphone to come out. There's no need to clog up everyone's airwaves with bittorrent traffic just to make a few selfish people's iphones browse the web marg

Why?

[risinganger]

Probably without exception the data plans here in the uk aren't cheap. I doubt this is much different to most countries right now. What 'unlimited' plans there are are just like the 'unlimited' plans we get from our ISPs - in other words there isn't anything unlimited about it. So BitTorrenting on a phone is likely to be an expensive proposition compared to BitTorrenting on a home pc.

Next is battery life. The battery life on my n70 is crappy enough as it is. I really don't need to be draining it any faste

Why Not?

[bhima]

Bittorrent is just another protocol to share data. Does it really matter what protocol is used to get the data?

Besides, it's not like are going to be sharing 500 Terabyte HD movie collections with their phones... yet.

Re:

[risinganger]

Does it really matter what protocol is used to get the data?

I would say so yes. Would you log on to a remote client over the internet with telnet anymore or would you sensibly use ssh? Slightly off topic as far as examples go but it should get the point across.

The BitTorrent protocol keeps connections open with multiple peers and periodic communication with a server. If I was mad enough to download a video or music file on my phone I certainly wouldn't want the phone spending the next several hours uploading on my behalf - the battery drain being a major factor. I

Re:

[Opportunist]

Does it really matter what protocol is used to get the data?

You're not a Comcast customer, obviously.

Re:

[webmaster404]

Actually some phones have wi-fi built in so you only need to use someone's open access point (the iPhone supports wi-fi) and use that. Torrents would be good, but there isn't much disk space in the phones to make it useful for data storage such as for CD ISOs and not for DVD ISOs in the least, 4-8 gigs is the max the iPhone has and most other phones give you 4 gigs at max. So until data increases, it doesn't have much practical purpose, expessaly when you can't get data off your phone in a normal way you ha

Re:

[blackest_k]

wmtorrent (trial version) works on my HTC universal and to be quite honest its not that good.

It does work although very slowly. A popular torrent which normally would download in a couple of hours max about 350 meg took 24 hours and the phone needed to be kept on charge. The other major problem was that you need at least twice the size of the torrent as free space. If you tried it on a UK data plan, you would probably be able to do it maybe once in a month to be within your data allowance, unfortunately it'

Not with Canadian Data costs...

[PhotoGuy]

With the data rates [telusmobility.com] we pay in Canada, it's probably not going to be much of a viable option up here for awhile.

My phone is EVDO capable, but I make sure I turn it off (although I can't seem to connect with it anyway). If it did connect at EVDO speeds, it could rack up hundreds of dollars of charges in a few minutes, with the dollars-per-megabyte we pay up here.

Here's hoping the Canadian government's push to open up the spectrum to new competition will help make these things a bit more reasonable.

WooHoo!!

[jo42]

The carriers are absolutely going to love this. The amount of money they are going to make from data charges will be record breaking.

Coming Soon?

[rastilin]

Azureus is written in Java. Anything that can run Java can therefore run bittorrent already. The only issue is memory use, you'd need to either optimize Azureus or have a phone with a chunky amount of RAM.

Granted, that implies input and screen space, but it would run.

Re:

[Eternauta3k]

Wouldn't it have to be written for and compiled with J2ME?

Re:

[rastilin]

I admit that is the flaw in my plan. However, if one has a sufficiently powerful platform, one doesn't need to use ME. Or one could provide VMs for both. The real issue is that Azureus uses up 98MB of RAM or so. My point is that it could be done and there are miniature computers with 256+MB of RAM and wireless available. They're just very expensive.

Re:

[burris]

So much for "write once, run everywhere."

Re:

[Xiaran]

Errr. What? Because a desktop application that runs on every major desktop platform(very well I might add) cant automagically run on a memory limited device then java is a failure?

Re:

[rastilin]

Yeah, it's not perfect but it's pretty close.

Re:

[nahpets77]

In addition to the ram, you'd also need a WAY more powerful processor, and a lot more storage space on your phone to make it practical. You'd be basically turning your phone into a tablet PC, so why not just get one of those? Also, what about battery life? Azureus constantly running on your phone would drain it pretty quick.

Re:

[rastilin]

I don't know about more powerful processor. I suspect that Java's performance is often underrated as on this machine it seldom reaches 2% processor usage. Generally hovering around 1%. A 300mhz processor like the ipaq 1940 would be fast enough to run it fine.

Re:

[nahpets77]

It's not Java that takes a lot of resources, it's Azureus; check out the resources it uses on a regular desktop machine in terms of RAM and CPU usage. If you wanted to run Azureus in the background without having it greatly impact performance, I would think a better processor is needed; not just more speed, but cache too.

Re:

[rastilin]

Nevertheless, it was Azureus I was talking about. 0 - 2% processor usage but a massive memory sink.

Re:

[nahpets77]

I find your 0-2% CPU usage estimate for Azeurus hard to reconcile with my own experience, which is more like 15-30% (of course, this depends on how many torrents are open). The only torrent client I've used that has been in the <2% range is rtorrent [rakshasa.no]. When I use ktorrent, which is a native KDE app, I get about 15% CPU usage, so I would guess that a Java app like Azureus would be on par or worse than that. A quick google search brought up some pages where users are complaining about Azureus CPU usage of

Re:

[rastilin]

Personal experience counts for very little. But I'd like to refer you to this screenshot anyway. [imageshack.us]
4 torrents open, 27GB of data roughly.

Re:

[rastilin]

That was a silly mistake, sorry. http://img164.imageshack.us/img164/5008/memoryusems8.jpg [imageshack.us]

Re:

[nahpets77]

Like I said, CPU usage is largely affected by how many torrents are open and how active they are. If you have torrents open that are using up a lot of bandwidth (~1MB/s), you should see your CPU usage climb, not to mention the IO activity to your disk. In any event, I think the 100MB RAM requirement pretty much kills any argument for using Azureus on a cell phone. ;)

What's the point?

[kieran]

Maybe I'm being dumb, but I don't see the point of this. Files sent to a mobile are relatively small, even in the case of video due to the size of the screen, and mobile bandwidth is expensive. Bittorrent, on the other hand, is designed to save bandwidth for the server, not the client.

It seems like a bad trade-off to save yourself cheap server bandwidth by spending expensive radio bandwidth.

Re:

[cerberusss]

Files sent to a mobile are relatively small, even in the case of video due to the size of the screen, and mobile bandwidth is expensive. Bittorrent, on the other hand, is designed to save bandwidth for the server, not the client.

Not any more. I've got an HTC S710 a.k.a. HTC Vox [wikipedia.org] and this baby has WiFi and a slot for MicroSD, which run to 1+ Gb. I think it's nice to snort a slow torrent through the phone during the night.

Re:

[palegray.net]

Files sent to a mobile are relatively small now. My home computer had 64 MB of RAM in it several years ago, as well.

On a different point, with all the news going around about ISPs screwing around with P2P traffic, how long before some wireless ISP comes out with a fantastic data plan, but starts choking off protocols as they see fit?

Competition will eventually result in much broader availability of "unlimited" data plans for mobile devices, the same way competition allows MetroPCS to thrive in several

Re:

[kieran]

When I say files sent to mobiles are relatively small, "relatively" is the key word. Sure, they'll increase in size over time, but bandwidth keeps getting cheaper and wireless protocols keep getting better, as does battery life. I maintain that they are and will remain relatively small compared to the sort of traffic a home PC gets, and more importantly the bandwidth available to fixed servers at any given price point.

Torrent p2p?

[nurb432]

Just hope they don't use comcast for any of their service.

Yeah, right

[Reality Master 101]

It ain't happening by Apple. Considering Apple made a deal with YouTube to convert all their videos to Quicktime, Apple is dead-set against allowing any industry standard CODECs on the iPhone. A bit torrent client would be totally useless on the iPhone -- nothing that I encounter is ever in Quicktime.

Now, if and when hackers get some reasonable CODECs on the iPhone, then we'll be talkin'. Though, those same hackers will get bit torrent running on the iPhone as well, so I don't think we'll need to wait for Apple anyway.

Re:

[peragrin]

Name one Industry standard Codec? quicktime is at least playable on linux, windows and OS X. unlike Say WMV where msft won't even release the specs for it, so OS X and linux users are out of luck period.

besides Youtube uses Flash video where the individual codec doesn't matter so much.

Re:

[emilv]

You can play WMV files in OSX with the Flip4Mac codec: http://www.flip4mac.com/wmv_download.htm [flip4mac.com]

Re:

[peragrin]

only WMV 9 and less. wmv 10 and 11 are only barely supported and none of the DRm files. which are the ones created standard and needs to be turned off manually.

Re:

[Joe Tie.]

I've had far more luck with wmv on linux than with quicktime. Unless there's DRM in it, WMV will always play for me. Quicktime seems to be somewhere around 70% of the time. That's great, and I'm not complaining, but it's enough to get me to groan on those times I see it as the sole format for something.

Re:Yeah, right

[pushing-robot]

From Wikipedia [wikipedia.org]

In October 2005, Apple Inc began selling H.264-encoded videos over the Internet through their iTunes Music Store.[11] Initially selling just television series and music videos, they expanded in September 2006 to sell films. On May 30, 2007 Apple announced plans to integrate streaming of YouTube videos into the Apple TV. In a later interview, Apple VP David Moody revealed that all of YouTube's videos are going to be transcoded to H.264 for higher compatibility and quality on the Apple TV. Starting in June, YouTube will be automatically encoding all new uploads with H.264. Their intention is to have the entire video catalog available in H.264 this autumn. Apple's iPhone supports H.264 Baseline Profile, Levels 2.1 and 3, at resolutions up to 480x320 or 640x480 and bitrates up to 1.5 Mbit/s and is capable of playing the YouTube video content.[12]

Adobe will support H264 in its Flash Player [13].

So you're saying that H.264 [wikipedia.org] isn't an industry standard? As opposed to Flash Video? [wikipedia.org]

I guess Apple must have bought out Adobe as well, considering the next Flash Player will use (cough) "Quicktime".

You think ISPs think bittorrent is evil, try WISPs

[nweaver]

ISPs think BitTorrent is incredibly evil, because from the ISPs viewpoint it is VERY inefficient... Bittorrent is not about efficient file distribution (thats called Akamai), rather Bittorrent is a way for someone to provide a large file cheaply, because it puts the bandwidth costs directly on the customers of the large file.

Unless the protocol has a significant number of simultaneous users for a given file within the ISP's local network, everything is actually transfered twice: once in, and once out. This isn't an efficiency savings, it is an efficiency hit, and a big one given the volume transferred.

They can't cache it either, because so many uses are copyright violations and the protocol is not designed to be friendly to transparent caches. You could make up a cache, but you'd basically have to do a LOT of work with an IDS and a custom cache for a cache which will require many MANY terabytes of disk and that will get you sued if you deploy it.

Likewise, for a mobile use, it will suck twice the power, as you send and receive EVERYTHING twice on your local link.

And wireless bandwidth is much more valuable than the commodity internet link (there is a lot less of it), so even if items ARE staying in the ISP, the double transfer problem is a huge issue unless you have a bunch of people getting the same file right next to each other.

Bittorrent in the mobile world saves the content provider from having to provide cheap, wired bandwidth by making the recipients and/or their WISPs provide expensive wireless bandwidth instead!

Re:You think ISPs think bittorrent is evil, try WI

[burris]

They can't cache it either, because so many uses are copyright violations and the protocol is not designed to be friendly to transparent caches. You could make up a cache, but you'd basically have to do a LOT of work with an IDS and a custom cache for a cache which will require many MANY terabytes of disk and that will get you sued if you deploy it.

In the USA at least, ISPs running automatic caches on behalf of their users are protected from secondary infringement liability by the DMCA.

BitTorrent implemente

Way ahead of its time.

[EddyPearson]

Ok, Its fairly clever, I'll grant you (Though, its not THAT tricky to code a BitTorrent client in Java), but with mobile data tariffs being what they are, whose actually going to use it?

Re:

[pbxtreme8720]

The UK is getting alot better with their data tariffs. with unlimited data for around 10 extra and good 3g coverage and most towns having 3.5g this could be very good.