

Japan's earthquake didn't even slow BitTorrent use - zbischof
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2011/04/japans-earthquake-didnt-even-slow-bittorrent-use.ars

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veidr
Well, this is interesting, but it also makes perfect sense to me. After the
first quake hit, the cell phones were down, the lusernet was down (SMS and
cell providers' proprietary mail systems, I mean), and even landlines were
down (overloaded by frantic callers). But the Internet was utterly
unperturbed.

We tend to have synchronous 100Mbps or 1Gbps fiber here, even at home. I was
not able to call anybody on the office phones, nor on my iPhone, but in the
minute after the quake I was quickly able to Skype and Facetime to various
people. I was actually viewing my home office with EvoCam (though nobody
happened to be there at the time) when the second big quake struck. Watching
stuff fall off the shelves remotely.

AFAICT, places that didn't lose electric power didn't lose Internet either,
and since torrents don't tend to be manual things and the Internet
infrastructure here can easily handle millions of people jumping on the web to
see what is going on (though that can't be said of www.tepco.co.jp, which did
go down), everything just kept plugging along.

