BitTorrent usage in Japan was only temporarily affected by the earthquake.

aqualab.cs.northwestern.edu

5 pointszbischof2 comments

Surprisingly we see that the change was rather minor, and that by about 6 hours after the earthquake, people began joining more swarms.

I thought people might find this interesting.

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It was pretty amazing. I couldn't call or text anyone for quite some time after the quake, but the internet connection was totally unaffected. I was talking to people around the world on Facebook, and even made some phone calls through gmail. The telcos could learn something from the ISPs.

Yeah I was surprised by the results. After the earthquake, you see that the number of peers stays pretty constant for about 6 hours after the quake. I'm guessing that people had better things to do than turn BitTorrent on or off. However, the network is still there. The day after the earthquake I was able to email my former host family in southern Hokkaido.

I was expecting to see something more similar to what we saw in Egypt and Libya when their Internet got shut off:

http://aqualab.cs.northwestern.edu/blog/egypt-libya-peers.ht...

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