Use some Grains of Salt in digesting these articles. The sky will not fall but, they have some general information about UDP growth and the internet related generaly to our game. During the Great Depression going to the Motion Pictures, .05-.50 cent tickets was cheap escapism entertainment. Today during our down economy the internet is the cheap escapism entertainment.
http://www.christopher-parsons.com/blog/technology/p2p/internet-drowning-in-the-bits-of-udp/Richard Morris, over at the Register, took uTorrent’s shift to the UDP protocol as an opportunity to cry that the sky was falling. Drawing a parallel between the use of UDP and “Congestion Collapse” or “Internet meltdown”, he argues that shifting to UDP, and away from TCP/IP’s native congestion management features, demands that ISPs be permitted to take a more active role in managing their networks.
http://arstechnica.com/old/content/2008/12/utorrents-switch-to-udp-and-why-the-sky-isnt-falling.arsThe TCP protocol that nearly all applications use—especially the ones sending a lot of data—has a traffic management system built in that is known as congestion control. The congestion control algorithms make TCP slow down when packets get lost, eventually reaching an equilibrium between packet loss and sending rate. Other TCP sessions flowing through the same part of the network see the same packet loss rate, so all these TCPs converge on a similar sending rate, making them share the limited bandwidth equally. UDP, on the other hand, doesn't have any congestion control built in. It's basically an extremely lightweight wrapper around the IP protocol that allows applications to send packets any way they feel like, without providing any feedback about congestion in the network.
So a naive UDP application will just send packets at the highest rate the network interface can support—or maybe even higher—almost certainly overloading some part of the network. However, this is not what µTorrent does. According to the forum post announcing the alpha, "This UDP-based reliable transport is designed to minimize latency, but still maximize bandwidth when the latency is not excessive." So uTP avoids overloading the uplink of the user running the application—removing the need for BitTorrenters to impose limits on the BitTorrent upload and download speeds to avoid slowing down other applications.
However, the core of the internet works at very high speeds, so that even if part of an ISP's infrastructure is severely overloaded, this doesn't introduce much delay or latency—
just packet loss. So if uTP only looks at latency in order to determine how fast it can communicate, massive use of uTP could still cause problems in ISP networks and/or push out other (TCP) traffic. Unfortunately, the µTorrent site doesn't provide any information one way or the other.
