title: Faster file transfer than FTP
body: <p>FTP is a pure TCP-connect protocol, and thus AFAIK "as fast as it gets" when considering TCP file transfer options.</p>
  
  <p>However, there are some other products that do not run over TCP - examples are the commercial products <a href="http://www.fujitsu.com/global/services/software/filetransfer/">BI.DAN-GUN</a>, <a href="http://www.asperasoft.com/en/technology/fasp_overview_1/fasp_technology_overview_1">fasp</a> and <a href="http://www.filecatalyst.com/filecatalyst-is-fast/">FileCatalyst</a>. The latter product points out <a href="http://www.filecatalyst.com/starting-points/fast-file-transfer/">problems with pure TCP</a>, and one can read more on Wikipedia, e.g. starting from <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_congestion">Network Congestion</a>.</p>
  
  <p>What other alternatives are there? .. in particular Open Source ones? Also, one would think that this should be an RFC of sorts - a <em>standard</em> largish-file-transfer-specific protocol, probably running over UDP. Anyone know of such a protocol, or an initiative? (The Google <a href="http://www.chromium.org/spdy/spdy-whitepaper">SPDY</a> is interesting, but doesn't directly address fast large-file-transfer)</p>