* Adrian Chadd:
So which ISPs have contributed towards more intelligent p2p content routing and distribution; stuff which'd play better with their networks?
Perhaps Internet2, with its DC++ hubs? 8-P I think the problem is that better "routing" (Bittorrent content is *not* routed by the protocol AFAIK) inevitably requires software changes. For Bittorrent, you could do something on the tracker side: You serve .torrent files which contain mostly nodes which are topologically close to the requesting IP address. The clients could remain unchanged. (If there's some kind of AS database, you could even mark some nodes as local, so that they only get advertised to nodes within the same AS.) However, there's little incentive for others to use your tracker software. What's worse, it's even less convenient to use because it would need a BGP feed. It's not even obvious if this is going to fix problems. If upload-related congestion on the shared media to the customer is the issue (could be, I don't know), it's unlikely to help to prefer local nodes. It could make things even worse because customers in one area are somewhat likely to be interested in the same data at the same time (for instance, after watching a movie trailer on local TV).