Some Indian ISPs Are Actually Boosting Torrent Speeds – Is Yours? When all hope seemed lost, some good ISPs are actually boosting their download speeds!
By Rustam Singh
Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.
You're reading Entrepreneur India, an international franchise of Entrepreneur Media.
When it comes to the internet and India, the usual tone of conversation is depressing, negative, or outright disappointing. Sometimes it's how India literally does not have, even one single popular ISP that provides unlimited internet without speed caps. Other times, it's about how certain websites, not even adult websites (not that there's any reason a democratic society would ban those either), being completely blocked for no reason whatsoever.
Still other times it's how deceitful ISPs are advertising their speeds – when 4G doesn't even match 3G speeds globally. And worse of all is the fact that all advertisements portray speeds to be more important than data allowance. Finally, there's good news coming from Indian internet service providers – some of them have teamed up to boost speeds by which torrents can be used in India!
Here's a complete summary o9f what you should know about:
What's actually happening?
After a massive torrent aggregator search engine, Torrentz went down for undisclosed reasons several other websites have tried to take its place. Joining the club is TorBox, a website that claims to be a large cache of torrents that can be searched and downloaded. Now Torbox is supporting local peer-to-peer searches being prioritized before other results, thus giving users much higher speeds.
How does it work?
The technical aspects of it are rather confusing, so we'll cut to the simplistic details. Torrents work by peer-to peer-transfers – one user's data is downloaded by hundreds, or thousands of other users, without any website or server hosting the data at any given point of time. This means data transfer is more secure, and surpasses some legal restrictions. What TorBox has done is coordinated with some ISPs to favor local peers (or people you download torrent's data from) over international ones. Thus, your data has to travel much shorter distances and ISPs can boost favoring this traffic over regular traffic.
What's in it for ISPs?
For starters, news like these would naturally boost market shares. So there are more new consumers buying their connections.
Secondly, when using local peers for data transfers, ISP's cost in investment for the said traffic is next to nothing. So what's virtually free for them, is passed on to the local consumer- at a much faster speed. It's a win-win for everyone.
Finally, users using this service mean they're naturally using lesser bandwidth on regular data surfing, so there's freer available bandwidth with all users.
Which ISPs are in the list so far?
The list includes:
- Alliance Broadband
- Excitel
- Syscon Infoway
- True Broadband
If your ISP isn't on the list, its best you contact TorBox to pass on the word to the ISP to get in on this soon.
Some users have even reported getting an actual download speed more than the internet plan they have subscribed for. Always remember while torrents are completely legal everywhere in the world, what you download from them isn't. Be sure not to download otherwise criminal data that can land you in a lot of trouble.
Are you lucky to be in the list of ISPs? What's your average monthly torrent consumption like? Let us know in the comments on our official Facebook page Entrepreneur India
