this is overly-simplistic and naive but how do you donate bandwidth?

Is it fairly easy to do on a technical level? I am no IT guy but am familiar with the very basic concepts of ftp, bandwidth, etc. and you think that there be a way to form a bandwidth collective, almost like an insurance company or a bandwith bank that people could donate untapped bandwidth to.

What got me thinking is that there are probably a lot of DUers like me that start a website and never really get close to the traffic to make a dent in their available bandwith. If you got 100 people to donate an average of 25 GB of bandwidth a month to DU, I would that think that 2500 GB would be a fairly substantial "emergency blood supply" that DU could tap into in order to reduce the need for Level 1's.

What in particular is overly naive about this concept? Because I am afraid that IT people when reading this will just shake their head and think I am a 12 year old girl in Witchita, Kansas that just left AOL chat for the first time.

:blush:

BZZZZT, I'm right.

I run a independent movie website, http://www.fanflicks.com/ and I have a lot of bandwidth based on what I am paying for through my webhost (300GB bandwidth/month). To "donate" bandwidth, this could be in the form of hosting a video file on one's website so someone can have more than one place to go, to actually download the file. Bascially if you are hosting something for someone this is an example of donating bandwidth. If anyone has something they'd like to share, just send me an email. contact@fanflicks.com

For video and other large files, it's easy. Seed other people's files via bittorrent. All you'd need is to coordinate a list with people sharing BW as to the list of files.

(for that matter, you don't really even need to run a seed, just bittorrent the file down and leave the client running.)

The ISP's will not make up all of that lost income is the reason why this will not happen.

It's a fine idea and might be doable one day, but not today...

We've all got our bandwidth on different circuits, via different providers. We can't just ask our Internet provider to take the chunk off the top that we don't use from their router and "magically" put it over on the DU router run somewhere else.

There are switches and routers and circuits and tunnels involved. FTP is on a totally different layer... Bandwidth is just what each pipe has. Think of it as a network of water pipes... Literally. I can't just say "Well I'm only drinking four cups of water from the pipe that I use, so here, divert that water over to that pipe over there that you (my provider) have no direct connection to..."

Just doesn't work that way.

One day, in say twenty years, the Internet might be based on protocols and hardware that are more reflective of a living organism and might allow that, but right now, not so much.

Good idea though. You're merely ahead of your time. :) Until then, feel free to pony up a few bucks to DU. That's where you can overcome the limitations of technology and contribute to bandwidth.

With respect to your question, (and being a webmaster) there is nothing I can see you can do, and quite frankly, I don't see DU's problem being bandwidth, rather, server capacity.

On the other hand, you could support 'the cause' by being a seed or participant in a Bittorrent in related files (MP3s of AAR, PDFs of reports, videos, etc)

I could see this being quite a help in spreading the word and in doing so may help diversify the overall traffic away from DU while helping the 'cause' in general...

There's TONS of bittorrent info on google and on many, many, many websites for you to find out more about it...