Robin Hoods Playground

uTorrent Reaches Milestone With 2.0 Release
Written by Ernesto

The uTorrent development team officially released the long awaited version 2.0 of their popular application today. The release hopes to optimize the download experience for uTorrent users while eliminating the need for ISPs to manage, block or limit BitTorrent traffic.

utorrentuTorrent for Windows saw its first public release in September 2005 and soon became the most widely used BitTorrent applications. The client is used by more than 50 million users worldwide and this number continues to rise.

Today, uTorrent version 2.0 was officially released. This new release is built to be more network friendly thanks to the Micro Transport Protocol (uTP) which aims to mitigate network congestion caused by poorly configured BitTorrent clients.

uTP is a new and improved implementation of the BitTorrent protocol which is designed to be more network friendly than its predecessor. The current implementation often causes interference with other applications. This is one of the main reasons why ISPs try to slow it down, or even stop it altogether. uTP aims to solve this problem.

Simon Morris, BitTorrent’s VP of Product Management is quite proud of the end result, and told TorrentFreak that most ISPs have also responded positively to the implementation of the uTP protocol.

“In general the ISPs who we have explained the technology to have been quite pleasantly surprised. There are occasional noisy skeptics who think its something evil, but they are generally poor confused souls who are more interested in selling a centralized vision of the internet rather than the distributed egalitarian system we have today,” Morris said.

“I’m excited about uTP finally arriving at a full scale deployment on the internet and I really hope that ISPs take the time to understand the potential benefits to them before they take decisions about how to manage this new class of traffic on their networks,” he added.

Aside from being gentle to the ISP’s networks, uTorrent 2.0 might also have a beneficial effect on the download speeds of individual users. Since there is less congestion, uTorrent users will experience no slowdowns in web-browsing.

Less congestion and a more efficient use of the network may eventually result in faster download speeds, which means that it will be a win-win situation for both ISPs and uTorrent users.

my utorrent stays between 900KB and 1.3MB/s when downloading and browsing the web is still terrible for me. its always been like that and i haven't seen any changes with the 2.0 release.

Of course, if your utorrent app is using all of your bw then anything else that needs bw will be slow. The article didn't say you would have more bw available it just said that it wouldn't interfere with other applications as it's done in the past. Not too mention uTP is designed as an overall network protocol specifically directed at ISP's management systems. This protocol should allow the Network engineers and managers another option when delivering bw to it's customers and how the applications controlling such bandwidth are used. It has literally nothing to do with the end users system bw.

it interferes with my ps3, would this new version not do this? i have to turn utorrent off when i want to go online on my ps3 otherwise i either cant sign in or wen i do it signs me out at any random time lol

2.0 is less likely to interfere with your ps3. But keep in mind the bw issue. If uTorrent is using all of your available bw on downloads or uploads, then expect some lag. Or you can set the controls on uTorrent to allow for sufficient bw while online.

It still signs me out so im gunna have to stick to the old fasion way of doin it, turning utorrent off