Managing network congestion is a major issue for both wireless carriers and scores of vendors. But what if there was a way to flatten the time-of-day traffic distribution, so that idle network resources in the middle of the night could be used more extensively? Some vendors are already working on solutions in this area, but one of the more unique approaches to the problem comes from a somewhat unlikely source: file-sharing service BitTorrent, which has long the bane of carriers for pushing massive amounts of data onto carrier networks. Senza Fili Consulting's Monica Paolini reports that BitTorrent developed a transmission protocol that enables BitTorrent traffic to be carried only when the traffic load on the network is sufficiently low that the additional BitTorrent traffic does not slow down other active applications. Commentary
