Indian ISPs have partnered with Torbox to provide high-speed torrent services: Report

Piracy is a hot topic here. Recently , the government proposed a penalty of three years imprisonment for simply visiting torrent sites, and also asked ISPs to block torrent sites. As we’ve pointed out  in the past, blocking a torrent site isn’t going to help matters much. Accessing any blocked site is just a question of finding the right VPN service or using Tor. Taking down torrent sites also does nothing since those sites will usually find a new home. ISPs themselves don’t like torrent traffic mostly because it places a heavy load on their system. To top it off, a lot of this traffic will come from outside the ISP’s network, which is expensive. TorrentFreak points out that some Indian ISPs have taken a rather unusual approach to the problem. ISPs including Sifi and Alliance Broadband have partnered with Torbox.net to offer so called “unlimited peering” services. An ISP must sign a peering agreement with Torbox to use its service and in exchange, Torbox finds and routes torrent traffic to local peers. In other words, Torbox tries to find PCs (peers) on the ISPs own network that are ‘seeding’ the same content that another user is attempting to torrent. This ensures that the bulk of the data traffic stays within the ISPs own network. In effect, the user gets the same speeds as he would on a local network, regardless of the bandwidth he paid for. Benefits for the ISP are two-fold. First, the bandwidth usage is largely within the ISPs own network, drastically cutting down on costs. Second, the subscriber is happy because he gets access to much higher speeds than he paid for. The report also indicates that Indian ISPs are using their own ‘caching servers’ to reduce the load on their networks. If your ISP has partnered with Torbox, you’ll be allowed to browse through locally seeded content and download that content at high speed. If not, you’ll receive a notice that your ISP hasn’t signed a peering agreement with Torbox. Torbox itself doesn’t handle ‘peering’; it doesn’t host the content itself. It only searches for and links to peers with the same content that you are torrenting. While we don’t actually condone piracy, this approach to tackling the problem of piracy is a rather elegant one. It’s a win-win for everyone but the people whose content is being pirated.