Indian ISPs Tie Up with Torbox to Provide Higher Download Speeds

To the delight of many pirates in India, ISPs are now teaming up with Torbox.net to reduce the load on their own network. As reported by TorrentFreak, ISPs in India, including Alliance Broadband, Excitel, Sifi Broadband, Syscon Infoway and True Broadband have provided a torrent search engine that connects users to ‘local’ peers to give maximum download speeds.

Pirates of the Indian Ocean

Even though Netflix landed a few months ago in India, other services like HBO Now, Spotify, Pandora, Hulu and many others are still not available here. This, along with a not-so-strict enforcement of digital laws, has made piracy rampant in India. But from a networking point of view, ISPs have never liked their users downloading GBs of data via torrents. The reason is simple – load on the bandwidth.

Pirates in India have been notorious about hogging the limited bandwidth available.

Since the Internet infrastructure is still not as good as the Western/Asian counterparts, Indian ISPs have struggled dealing with this issue and finding any solution. Till now.

ISPs-Torrents: Brotherly Love!

Since pirating anything in India via torrents is almost impossible to stop, some ISPs have realized that a better solution is to provide their own local P2P engine. Even though some of these ISPs have had their own caching services earlier, this is the first time they’ve all tied up with a service like Torbox.

Torbox can utilize local peer connection to offer better download speeds.

It may not be well known elsewhere, but if you’re lucky then your ISP is already in a tie-up with Torbox to provide you with better download speeds. If not (like me), well – hard luck!

Like Torrents, But Different

Torbox uses the same principle of torrenting, but has a few key differences. For one, it is based on ‘network proximity’ technology – relying on files that it can find closest to you, in your network. Torbox explains –

Based on your IP address TorBox can estimate how well you are connected to peers who have the content in question. It’s quite a tough job but luckily it works.

Downloads take place through regular torrent clients but torrent swarms often connect to dedicated “cache peers” which assist in speeding up the entire process. The actual peering is handled by other services, such as Extreme Peering, which is operated by Extreme Broadband Services (EBS).

Hit or Miss?

Is your ISP one of the listed ones above? Or are you ruing shifting to another ISP because of limited download speeds? In either case, we’d like to know your opinion on the whole piracy saga in India and if this feels like a right move. Meet us in the comments section.

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