Leonid Bershidsky notes that Firechat was devleoped by Stanislav Shalunov.  His quest to find ways to use bandwidth more efficiently and may be  just the beginning of a technological path that could change the way we understand connectivity.

Bershnidsky writes:  The Russian’s work had exciting implications for BitTorrent, the peer-to-peer file-sharing service that was facing problems with broadband operators for using too much bandwidth. BitTorrent acquired a small company that Shalunov had founded, and by 2011 it was using his flexible protocol for 95 percent of its traffic. Apple, too, adopted it to send updates to users of its software. The torrent app and the system updates could now run in the background without slowing the user’s usual Internet activity. “A typical connection on the Internet may only be utilized perhaps 50 percent,” Shalunov explained to Fast Company magazine last year. “This basically gives you a free factor of two for how much traffic you can carry on those same connections.”