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An Introductory Guide to the BitTorrent File Sharing System

BitTorrent is one of the newest file-sharing services that is gaining notoriety and spreading amongst Internet users. BitTorrent is predominantly a music sharing system with over 90,000,000 members who can log on, search for and download a single song or full CD legally. Although there has been a great deal of controversy surrounding the downloading and transferring of media over the Internet, there is still a huge market of Internet users who want to download music and other media files.

As mentioned above, BitTorrent has an estimated 90,000,000 members who are connected and transferring files at an average speed of 128 Kbps, suggesting that the majority of users use broadband Internet connections. With over 120,000,000 music files to choose from and a total of 180,000,000 shared files to choose from, BitTorrent is one of the largest peer-to-peer file-sharing services available through the Internet.

BitTorrent: How it works

There are a number of Web sites throughout the Internet where you can search for and download torrents. Torrents are basically “seeds” through which you can download a given file. Lets say, for example, that you’re looking for a song called ‘Little Drum.’ You search for the song or the artist, and a series of results will be returned. The results represent available seeds to download the song. In order for a seed to be active, the file holder must be online and have the BitTorrent window open. When you begin to download the file, your own BitTorrent window opens and you now have your own seed that other people can download from.  So, while you’re downloading a file, another user can be downloading it from you.

BitTorrent & Peer-to-Peer Networks

BitTorrent is a peer-to-peer service in the sense that there is no central server that BitTorrent members connect to in order to enable transfers. (BitTorrent is currently testing a central server system dubbed BitTornado through which members log on to a central server in order to download and upload various types of media.)

Peer-to-peer networks serve the purpose of connecting two computers across the Internet as opposed to redirecting transfers through a central server. It is because of this that peer-to-peer connections are based solely on the bandwidth and computing power of the respective computers connected with one another. For example, if a T-1 computer is connected with another T-1 computer, the rate of transfer will be incredibly high. Downloads will complete in a matter of minutes. If, on the other hand, a dial-up computer is connected with another dial-up computer, the rate of transfer will be noticeably slower. Downloads could take several hours and connectivity interruptions could become commonplace. Because of this, it is recommended that BitTorrent users subscribe to a high speed broadband service and locate members who also have a broadband Internet connection to avoid lags and connectivity problems.