Torrents are inefficient

Torrents are now quite popular, many companies and open source projects are now using it for distribution.  Torrents are very easy to use which is important as a lot of people don’t know how to deal with multi-part files like split-rar’s or binary-split files that have to be concatenated together.

However in terms of bandwidth efficiency, torrents are horrible.  The bandwidth at my house is approximately 1MB/sec (8mbps).  I know this because I can download a FreeBSD ISO file from a very fast connection geographically near my network connection – only 3 hops away.  When I download 2-3 torrents at the same time, I am downloading at 230KBps in total and uploading at 100KBps in total.  And if I simultaneously download the same FreeBSD ISO I get 100KBps on that.  That means that my download is effectively capped at 330KBps.  Granted, there is a 100KBps uploading but where is the rest of my bandwidth???

I have noticed in the past when someone on a shared Internet connection would be downloading torrents, basically the Internet connection becomes UNUSABLE.  Latency, bandwidth are affected greatly.  If someone is leeching from an FTP site, this doesn’t really happen.  I suppose a lot of small packets are sent in both directions with torrents and that is the cause.  Anyone have any experience with this and want to share their opinion?