When I worked for TomTom, I developed and tested a system for distributing maps via BitTorrent.

I first looked at Red Swoosh and its Firefox extension, FoxTorrent. It would have been ideal, since we using the xulrunner platform for TomTom Home, but Akamai acquired Red Swoosh, and it vanished without a trace. [1] [2] [3] [4]

TomTom's Maps are perfect for BitTorrent distribution, because they're large (1 Gig and growing) and lots of people in the same region need to download the same map at the same time. And it would have been a wonderful legal and practical example of a legitimate use of BitTorrent to point to when companies like Comcast try tricks like blocking BitTorrent traffic.

I visited BitTorrent in San Francisco, and discussed it with Bram Cohen. Their technology seemed ideal for our purposes (it worked a bit like Red Swoosh / FoxTorrent), and they quoted me a price per gigabyte to distribute content over their BitTorrent DNA network, which was a hell of a lot cheaper than we were paying to Akamai (this was before the made BitTorrent DNA distribution free).

A couple days after that meeting, I stopped by the Akamai booth at the Game Developer Conference in San Francisco, and asked them what their prices were for using the Red Swoosh technology they'd recently acquired. Travis Kalanick, the founder of Red Swoosh, gladly told me about his technology and answered my technical questions. (I had previously been looking at Red Swoosh and FoxTorrent, before it was acquired by Akamai, and it would have been easy to integrate with our xulrunner based product, TomTom Home).

Akamai's sales people refused to quote me a price, despite repeated requests, so I told them the price BitTorrent quoted me, and told them we were ready to start testing as soon as possible, and asked again if they could at least give me a ballpark estimate of how much they would charge for distributing content via Red Swoosh, and when we could start testing. They muttered something about not having come up with a pricing model yet, but that I could get into their beta program, whenever that started, which they also would not state.

I was somewhat skeptical about Akamai's support for Red Swoosh, dedication to P2P technologies, and motivations for acquiring Red Swoosh, since P2P technologies are such a huge threat to their business model. It was getting a lot of attention before they acquired it. I was afraid that they might have just acqui-hired Red Swoosh simply to sweep it under the rug so they didn't have to compete with it. And I was afraid that if and when they finally figured out how to charge for it, it might not be such a great deal after all.

So I went back to Amsterdam, integrated BitTorrent DNA into TomTom Home (the desktop app for managing content and downloading maps on your TomTom device, like iTunes for TomToms instead of iPods, which happened to be implemented on xulrunner (the Mozilla "platform" that Firefox and TomTom Home are build on top of -- which Mozilla eventually lost interest in supporting as a third party application development platform).

It was easy to integrate BitTorrent DNA into TomTom Home, it worked well, and I performed a successful beta test with a bunch of users across the world, to measure how well it worked, how long it took, and how much it would save.

Then I did an analysis of the Akamai logs to figure out how much money we were spending on customers downloading maps, how long it took, where they were downloading them from, and how much money BitTorrent DNA would save us.

For example, Australia would have really benefited, because their connection to the outside world and Akamai coverage was terrible, but their internal connection speed and bandwidth was excellent, and everybody in Australia wants the Australia map, of course.

It turned out that BitTorrent would save TomTom about a million euros the first year, and more each year, since TomTom was distributing larger and larger maps, more frequently by subscription, and of course they hoped to get more customers over time. (See: http://www.sadtrombone.com ...)

But then all of a sudden, out of the blue, Akamai unilaterally lowered the prices they were charging TomTom, saving us a lot of money immediately, presumably to prevent us from switching to BitTorrent (after I had made a bit of a scene at Akamai's GDC booth, in front Travis Kalanick and their sales people, about just having talked Bran Cohen and acquired a quote and beta testing agreement from BitTorrent, and insisted that Akamai tell me what their prices were and when we could start testing -- that may have motivated them to unilaterally lower their prices).

So in the end, TomTom middle management decided to can the BitTorrent project, in spite of the fact that it was the TomTom founder Pieter Geelen's idea in the first place, and he'd been micromanaging the entire project and user interface all along, to make sure it would not just save us money, but also not have a negative impact on usability or customer perception.

There are some important non-technical issues to deal with that Pieter wanted to get right: making it easy to use, setting the defaults right, explaining what it is, getting consent from customers to use their upload bandwidth (since they may have to pay for it, have an upload cap, or want to use it for other ahem purposes), and clearly explaining what benefits customers get from it (not leaving the impression that it's just to benefit TomTom financially, at the expense of the customer), and revealing the possible costs and risks.

We put a lot of effort into that part of it, and I don't think it was going to be a problem. It seems to have worked out all right for WoW and Spotify (in retrospect, up to now).

It was disappointing that TomTom didn't use BitTorrent, but I can certainly understand Akamai's mortal fear of it, and I'm still skeptical that Akamai may have bought it just to sweep it under the rug so they didn't have to compete with it, and didn't really mean to roll it out practically and economically, and develop it to its full potential.

Years later, Akamai now has something called "Akamai NetSession", that may or may not be related to Red Swoosh -- I don't know much about it or how much it costs. Can anyone else comment on that, please? [5]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RedSwoosh

[2] http://www.akamai.com/html/about/press/releases/2007/press_0...

[3] http://gigaom.com/2008/05/03/whatever-happened-to-red-swoosh...

[4] http://techcrunch.com/2007/04/12/payday-for-red-swoosh-15-mi...

[5] http://www.akamai.com/client