Peer-to-peer (P2P) technology has had a lot of bad press over the last couple of years, yet it has the potential to drive the way we use the Internet in the future. For instance, instead of downloading directly from one server (and utilising their entire bandwidth), we could be downloading and sharing files from multiple sources, which means that these downloads are likely to be available for longer and more consistent. The future of movie downloads could rely on P2P technology to be able to deliver DVD-quality bandwidth across the net.

Bittorrent is a rather basic version of peer sharing technology and open-source developers have attempted to design and build a more powerful and flexible system. Azureus is their solution, based on Java so it offers the same solution across multiple operating systems.

Better still, it supports plugin technology and a number of plugins are available. You can schedule downloads with the Speed Scheduler, auto-adjust your connection speed with the Autospeed plugin and so on.

Note that this is the major v4 release that ships with a new user interface.