TechLahore

The New Scientist published a story about LUMS‘ PMB (Poor Man’s Broadband) software. This is a peer to peer architecture that is designed to accelerate downloads. It works somewhat like BitTorrent and other P2P applications, but there are some fundamental differences as well. For one, it’s focused on dialup users. For another, it implements pre-fetching and a browser plugin. This article from TechPin has more technical details.

A short extract from the New Scientist story says the following:

Instead of using expensive broadband or slow, unreliable dial-up connections, students at Lahore University of Management Sciences (LUMS) will try out a new system, dubbed “poor man’s broadband” (PMB). It allows computers to link to each other directly for faster downloads, and it works as long as at least one computer running the trial software has already downloaded the desired file from the internet. The system should also reduce the university’s risk of overloading the bandwidth supplied by its internet service providers (ISPs). PMB is a mixture of peer-to-peer (P2P) software – touted as the internet’s future (New Scientist, 13 October, p 28) – and pre-internet techniques, whereby users dialled other computers directly to exchange files. It is based on …

The invention has its detractors, of course, including ALL the readers that posted at this forum. However, it also has its supporters, including Microsoft, which has decided to fund this research.

Share this: