3 ms·

I'm curious how much the observed speed of Aspera on the Internet might rely on "nicer" protocols (TCP) backing off as Aspera causes congestion^H^H maximises li

• ncmncm 7y ago
  Excellent question. Interestingly (at least, I find it interesting) fasp can happily use up all the bandwidth the various TCP streams aren't using without affecting TCP rates at all. It also backs off and shares bandwidth with other instances of itself or other well-behaved protocols. With some coordination between them, multiple senders can share the available bandwidth in any chosen proportion. So, you can set up where A always gets 70% when it is sending at all, and B, C, and D share whatever is left when they have anything to send, but all without ever slowing whatever TCP traffic is running. An administrator can (literally) drag up and down the rates of ongoing transfers according to organizational priorities. That sort of featurism is part of why Aspera can command crazy prices. It sounds like people are getting good results with fdt. It leads me to wonder if fdt has any of this good-network-citizen capability. A lot of people using fdt and making the net worse for everybody else would be an unfortunate outcome. Aspera was pretty careful about it. (I keep trying to write ftd, but that is the florist service.)