“The BitTorrent protocol implements a hybrid client/server and
P2P file transfer mechanism. BitTorrent efficiently distributes
large amounts of static data, such as installation ISO images. It
can replace protocols such as anonymous FTP, where client
authentication is not required. Each BitTorrent client that
downloads a file provides additional bandwidth for uploading the
file, reducing the load on the initial source. In general
BitTorrent downloads proceed more rapidly than FTP downloads.“Unlike protocols such as FTP, BitTorrent groups multiple files
into a single package called a torrent. For example, you can
typically download several installation ISO images as a single
torrent…”