Good news for P2P fans! It seems ISPs were touting their new bandwidth control methods at a recent Las Vegas convention!
Most seemed to have distanced themselves from Comcast’s scorched earth policy of traffic management, though.
For example, several companies discussed “Smart” routing technology, which works by routing your requests to the closest physical location. So, presumably, if you’re downloading a torrent file, this smart routing will make it such that you’ll automatically download from the closest IP, thereby reducing stress on the network as a whole. No use downloading “Viva la Vida” from some kid in France when you’re neighbor one town over has it, in other words.
One other solution bandied about was to cache popular P2P content, but this would only apply to legal content.
And as much as we love downloading here and there, you gotta give credit to the ISPs and their cohorts for at least attempting to come up with workable solutions. That, or would you rather your ISP go the ol’ Comcast route? I say give ’em a chance to figure their stuff out.