What is a Bittorrent? All about the Fastest Way to Download

Recently (within the last couple years) many stories have made the news about file sharing and illegal downloading. You may have heard all the fuss about music mp3 downloads, or the pirating of movies online. More often than not, the story mentions that the files were downloaded via a bittorrent site. So, understandably, these sites have gotten a bad name, but so has the bittorrent process.

What is a bittorrent? Well, in the simplest sense of the word, it’s a torrent of bits, or a stream of information. It is not illegal, even though a lot of movies and songs are pirated with it. The process itself is actually quite ingenious, and makes for some very fast download speeds, all the way up to 1500 kb/s. For reference, the connection I have right now usually downloads (in the normal way) at about 80 kb/s max.

First we need to know a little bit about downloading in general.  Downloading is the process of sharing files from one computer on the internet to another. For instance, if I want the latest version of Ubuntu Linux (an operating system), I can just go to www.ubuntu.com, and download it. In other words, I tell their server that I want a certain file, and they send it my way. That’s normal downloading.

Bittorrent downloading is slightly different. Instead of having one computer send files to another, several computers with the same file all send a small chunk of the file. This allows the file to be downloaded much quicker, since multiple computers are all sending it at once. With enough computers contributing, you can reach that 1500 kb/s, which is a phenomenal download speed.

Where do all these computers contributing come from? Well, just about everywhere. The bittorrent community has developed a system where everyone helps. If you use bittorrent to download a file, your computer automatically “seeds” that file. That’s when you help distribute it to other people, and increase their download speeds. You can tell your computer not to share the file, but then you have turned from a “seeder” into a leech, where you only download for yourself, and aren’t willing to help others download as well.

The unique aspect of this system is that it punishes people who leech, and helps those who seed. Seeders get higher download speeds, and leechers have their download speed cut. That’s when it pays to be nice!

So how do you get started? You need a bittorrent client, a program that will connect all these streams of data into one file. uTorrent (www.utorrent.com) seems to be the best one for Windows. Then you download a torrent (the “settings” file) and open it with your bittorrent client. The bittorrent client will then handle the rest of the download. Congratulations!