[tor-relays] Min. Bandwidth for Bridge Relay?

[Sebastian G. <bastik.tor>]

freeflow at mail.md:
> Hi!

Hi there!

(I'm not an Tor official nor should you weight my opinion too much)

> I have around 50-60 KB/s of bandwidth that I'd like to use for running a
> bridge relay.

Great.

> Is this a sufficient amount of bandwidth? I ask because it doesn't seem
> like very much compared to the amounts that others donate to the tor
> network.

I got told that the uptime of a bridge should be at least a couple of
hours to be useful. (yep, uptime has nothing to do with bandwidth,
but..) IMO bridges are expected to be run from residential connections
(beside others) where bandwidth isn't as plentiful as it is for servers.
At least the upload-bandwidth is bad.

> Tor documentation suggests as little as 20 KB/s can be used to run a tor
> relay but this seems to be a very low badwidth rate.

As far as I know there were some changes that only with 30 KB/s will see
something one would call traffic.

> From looking at the tor status web page via blutmagie.de it would seem 
> that there some low bandwidth relays but are these really useful or too
> slow to be useful to the tor network?

"Normal" relays push much more traffic than 50 KB/s when they are
capable of doing so. I can't argue for or against another relay which
adds some bandwidth to the network.

For huge amounts of bandwidth (plus meeting the uptime requirement) I'd
argue for being a relay.

> If someone can confirm that 50-60 KB/s for bridge relay is useful then I
> would go ahead & run my bridge relay.

Bridges serve a different purpose than "normal" relays. Bridges are used
to get around censors (or not being "seen" as connecting to the Tor
network on first glance) where people are happy to reach the website
they wanted to visit. It's not about pushing large amounts of bandwidth
back an forth, it's more about providing access to Tor and therefor the
rest of the Internet.

> Best regards,
Also Best Regards,
Sebastian