[sundarurfriend]

That's a (technologically) brilliant solution, counter to the usual stuff they do antagonizing and annoying users. Hope this article doesn't end up killing Torbox, and hope more of the new players among Indian ISPs (like ACT, You) take this route too; BSNL is of course never going to do it, and Airtel doing it would probably put Torbox into enough scrutiny to kill it, so I hope they don't!

The article keeps mentioning peers in "local network" repeatedly - as an eternal beginner in the networking world, I wonder what exactly they mean. It's obviously not creating LANs willy-nilly (...right?), so what level do they consider "local" here?

[soneil]

'local' is pretty fluid in this context. If you can route from A to B without leaving the provider's network, it's 'local enough' for this usage. So if they have their own trunks from one city to the next, customers within the entire country could be 'local enough'. If they use someone else's backbone between cities, then 'local enough' would just be each city.

They're not actually concerned with physical distance, the number of hops, etc. It's simply the case that if they keep it entirely within the provider's network, the traffic costs the provider nothing. This is a huge win for the provider, so it's logical to 'share the win' with the end-customer to encourage such behaviour.

[mrkgnao]

Probably other people served by the ISP in, say, the same city?

[icebraining]

I'd say so. In Portugal, back when we had caps with different amounts for international vs national vs same-isp traffic, a group made a fork of Emule that could filter the peers based on which group their IP belonged to.

The result (for popular files) was that somebody would download it internationally, then it'd spread nationally and then inside each ISP in stages. It actually worked pretty well.

[Projects211]

We actually had roughly the same set up in college, using DC++ instead of Emule. Connections within the university weren't limited, but connections outside were. So one person would download it at limited speeds, then spread it around at unlimited speeds.

[wtmt]

I'm surprised that users are seeing a big jump in speeds. In my observation, many users in India who use public BitTorrent trackers have a strong tendency to cap their upload speeds heavily and also stop the torrent the moment the download completes in order to get by with whatever they have. This "win-win" scheme that gives local peers to torrent users, if adopted by many other ISPs, would probably result in slower speeds for all users and force them to connect to faster (non-local) peers outside the country.