BitTorrent battles accusations of VoIP, network clobbering

A full-blown blog-o-war has started between The Register and BitTorrent. A Register columnist said BitTorrent's uTorrent client is going to bring the internet to a crawl because of its preference for using UDP.

The use of UDP as UTorrent's default peer-to-peer protocol allegedly could make the amount of ungovernable traffic go through the roof, clobbering bandwidth, slowing gamers and VoIP. ISPs could control traffic flow by slowing down UDP traffic, but such a move would "utterly destroy VoIP," alleges The Register.

Techno sites have taken the cannon fodder and fired it with differing results. Excess UDP traffic could slow last-mile connections, say some, rather than bringing the whole Internet to its knees.

BitTorrent says The Register piece is "utter nonsense" and a switch to a UDP-based implementation of its client was intended to reduce internet congestion, not kill the Internet proper.

We suspect some of this brouhaha has to do with the fine British journalistic tradition (The Register is published in the UK) of running wild headlines and wilder stories to generate controversy and more readership. Gotta get those web hits up for the end of the year bonuses, wot?

For more:
- The Industry Standard raps on UDP vs TCP. Article [1].