uTorrent uTP Protocol Goes Open Source

BitTorrent Inc. announced the move of uTP, the BitTorrent protocol behind uTorrent 2.0, into open source development. The most important improvement to uTP is the protocol's network awareness. In other words, a BitTorrent client using uTP can detect network congestion and throttle itself accordingly. Thereby removing the need for Internet Service Providers to throttle user bandwidth.

uTP's throttling capabilities have not been acknowledged by major ISPs, as they continue to detect torrent activity and throttle user bandwidth.

As expected, the network awareness feature has drawn ire from users who want the most seeds and the fastest download speed, but developers haven't been happy with the feature either. uTP comes with more overhead compared to the previous client and other minor bugs have been reported.

BitTorrent Inc.'s decision to open source uTP is a solution to the above complaints.

"uTP continues to evolve and open sourcing the code will be essential in its continued development and adoption," Jenna Broughton, BitTorrent spokesperson told TorrentFreak.

The uTP code can be found at GitHub, with all licensing and documentation in tow. uTP is written in C++ with the external interface written in C.