3 ms·

I think what made Skype popular was it worked everywhere and was quite good at bypassing firewalls/DPI. It was everyone's goto as it had a high chance of succes

I think what made Skype popular was it worked everywhere and was quite good at bypassing firewalls/DPI. It was everyone's goto as it had a high chance of success especially in schools/uni. CGNAT could be another explanation. I still don't see why you wouldn't try and have p2p as a back channel that's attempted. If it can increase deployment speeds and improve user experience then its a huge plus. Think of any software updates at schools or Steam updates in a block of units. Most consoles and PC games still spend too much time with loading bars pulling 20 Gb updates.

Gigachad 4y ago
Slow updates isn’t really fixed by p2p though. Steam downloads run as fast as your internet speed. P2P can’t be any faster than that other than some highly unlikely situation that another machine on your local network already has the game. And that’s where p2p died. CDNs got really really fast and the user benefit reduced to nothing while the possible disruption from seeding large files remained. Especially as consumer upload isn’t that great so any uploading can disrupt online games.