I was spurred by some recent discussion to do some personal benchmarks of BitTorrent on my home dsl. As I suspected, my upload speed is less than my download by a wide margin. Upload is about 200 kbps and download is about 1.5 mbps. I did find that we have a pretty good vpn, as it didn't really affect the results.
BitTorrent isn't able to use all the bandwidth available. It's getting about 20KB/sec, or 160 kbps. About 1/10th of the available bandwidth.
In comparing sneaker-net to BitTorrent, it looks like my estimate of about 200 days to transfer 200 gig at 100 kbps is roughly right. My downloads aren't limited by my connection speed, the bottleneck must be somewhere further up the pipe in BitTorrent-land but not in my DSL provider-land.
Maybe VPBT(Virtual Private BitTorrent) would get an order of magnitude increase but only IF there were multiple seeds.
