I must say, bittorrent makes a huge difference for me, as a DSL user. Things that are widely desirable but not actually profitable to anybody to distribute often are oversaturated at the server, or the server is downed outright. bittorrent solves that problem rather elegantly. I've used it with great success to get movie trailers otherwise slashdotted to death at that moment, and to download ISO CD images of Linux distributions.

I can't speak for the bittorrent experience of 56k modem users. And it may be that speakeasy.net (my ISP) is a particularly lively community of bitorrent users, so that I tend to find the things I want conveniently available from users topologically close to me. But hey, that's a very cool thing for those in that situation and worth crowing about.

I haven't read the Wired article, though, so I'll take your word for it that they make wild-eyed claims about bittorrent and 56k bit-bangers.