Why is it seemingly faster to torrent?
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You need a blueprint a cabinet.
Download: You go to a manufacturer, which will give you the blueprint.
Torrent: You get a list of a bunch of people that have made the same cabinet (torrent), then you call each of them “Hey, could you give me the blueprint for the cabinet?” And everyone goes “Sure, I’ll send it to you in parts though cause I don’t have big enough envelopes”. And every single person on the list start sending pieces of the blueprint until eventually you have a giant puzzle of a blueprint that you can put together.
Why is it faster:
There are 2 limitation on how fast you can receive something sent to you: How fast you can receive (Your Download speed) and how fast it can be sent (their Upload speed).
When you download from somewhere, You’ll download your file as fast as the lower of either your download speed or their upload speed. Sometime they can throttle their own upload speed to incentivize you to pay to remove the throttle.
For a torrent, you ahve the same limitations, but 1) most people have really bad Upload speed and 2) you have more than 1 person that can upload. So assuming enough people have the file you’re looking for, When they reach the limit of their upload speed, you just ask someone else to send other parts at the same time. So this time, you’ll download as fast as the lower of either your download speed or their COLLECTIVE upload speed.
You can download a file faster from 150 people at 10k each per second than from a single source at 1M per seconds. Torrent is about quantity of uploaders rather than quality of uploaders.
It is worth noting that even if you don’t know it, when you download a torrent, you eventually become an uploader when you’re done with it. So you give back to others the files you’ve taken.
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