Microsoft to use P2P to distribute Windows 10 OS and app updates

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Feature seen in update download settings of Windows 10 build 10036.

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Read more.

Nice but ultimately too late to the party, most people have a decent internet connection now.

I think it's a silly idea. Many companies throttle P2P, meaning they'll get slower speeds than before...

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Originally Posted by MrRockliffe

I think it's a silly idea. Many companies throttle P2P, meaning they'll get slower speeds than before...

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You could look at it from the angle of, if more companies start using P2P for legitimate purposes, perhaps there will be more pressure from the public for them to stop throttling?

Maybe, but they likely won't care. I feel for Americans - I think all of them throttle the speeds, so they can't even switch company! In the UK it isn't as bad luckily.

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Originally Posted by MrRockliffe

I think it's a silly idea. Many companies throttle P2P, meaning they'll get slower speeds than before...

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IIRC some companies throttle Torrent traffic not P2P, there are many other types of Peer-to-Peer.

Personally I've never had any complaints with the download speeds of Windows and Office updates. It just downloads in the background unless I'm setting up a new PC for someone, where I trigger it manually, and even then it's not like you can't do other things while updates are downloaded and installed.

I guess LAN distribution might help small offices with no servers, if it's implemented intelligently, but I can't see it making any real difference.

All that said, some of the updates now are truly astronomical in size, making it difficult to push out updates at work with WSUS without bringing the network to its knees.

Nice that Microsoft has given some thought to spreading the load around and making the download wait a little shorter. That said, if they really want to get an "attaboy" from me then they could open Windows Update to 3rd parties - I really, really, really hate having umpteen different updaters on the system.

Heck, they can even rename it - Application Patch Tool - or "apt" for short. ;)

I would never trust updates sourced from a 3rd party PC, even if it allegedly had security built in. I assume they do some sort of checksum/signature verify with MS servers but I'd be wary of that getting manipulated or interfered with.

I would however welcome LAN sharing of updates with the right configuration options, Dropbox also has a feature like that and it does speed up sync. Useful in homes or small offices with multiple Windows installs and no WSUS server on site, however I could only turn it on for PCs on networks with no untrusted machines present otherwise you come back to the same problem above if there is a trojan horse PC on the network sharing it's dodgy updates around.

Not everyone in the world is operating on a high-bandwidth unlimited connection, some of the recent Windows updates have been 100s of MB so it could reduce internet downloads a great deal if grabbing locally.

I think it's a good idea. Net speeds here are...****. The number of times I've seen the "cannot resume download" dialogue...

A P2P option would be welcome.

This is hardly a magic bullet for slow internet. The only way P2P will help is if the internet is slow at the Microsoft end (is this an issue?) and most seem to be complaining about slow end-user connections. LAN could be nice particularly for those on metered connections.
Personally I've never noticed an issue with update speed throttling but then I've not had a fast end-user connection for a while now (although with 4G I seem to hit 2MB/s not infrequently, can't complain :D)

4 PC's in my house, will be great for me.

Reading the comments here makes me think that the people posting are assuming Microsoft's rationale behind pushing updates through P2P is for the benefit of the end user, when I read it I thought it was to reduce costs in infrastructure so they'll need fewer servers in order to roll out large scale updates.

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Originally Posted by KeyboardDemon

Reading the comments here makes me think that the people posting are assuming Microsoft's rationale behind pushing updates through P2P is for the benefit of the end user, when I read it I thought it was to reduce costs in infrastructure so they'll need fewer servers in order to roll out large scale updates.

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That's how I've always seen it? If I max out my connection when downloading something I don't really care where I'm getting it from and why would anyone else?

This is purely to reduce their own overheads while 'offering' increased download speeds for the people on fat internet connections.