Quake3World

I observed a class today all trying to download the same video and each person having different download times on said video. Each person was using the same model mac laptop and all were connected to the same router.

I was wondering if there has been any development in a smart router or even some sort of 3rd party software that could tell when multiple copies of the same exact data is being requested and react accordingly by requesting the data ONCE and caching it so all users requesting the data get it in the shortest time possible rather than waiting for their unique download to finish.

Thoughts?

You're essentially talking about multicasting out a file. That isn't a feature on any router line which I'm familiar with.

hmmm would this probably be because of the nature of the protocol(s) that are used to achieve multicasting?

Or is it just impractical?

Almost nothing supports it. The Linux kernel does, so you could set up a machine as a router. Though a HTTP proxy is probably a much simpler setup.