Slashdot Mirror
Virgin Media UK Begins Throttling P2P Traffic
An anonymous reader writes "The ISP which advertises itself as 'The fastest in the UK' and offers speeds of up to 100mbps has said it needs to throttle file sharing traffic to prevent slowness in other areas such as online multiplayer gaming. Trialing of the new traffic management plans commenced on March 2 and will only apply to upstream traffic, therefore download speeds will be unaffected. The clampdown will apply on top of the existing traffic shaping Virgin Media has in place and will affect all packages, including the previously unmanaged 100mbps deal. This policy, which applies to all broadband packages, is restricted to P2P applications and Newsgroups (which are commonly used to distribute large amounts of data)."
And this is why all traffic should be obfuscated, if not encrypted. The ISPs have no business knowing what the content of the packets going across their wires are.
"The ISP which advertises itself as 'The fastest in the UK' and offers speeds of up to 100mbps has said it needs to invest in infrastructure to prevent slowness in areas such as online multiplayer gaming.
Hah, who am I kidding.
Virgin Media: Well we haven't upgraded our infrastructure and now we are having problems with sheep leaving our oversubscribed networks. They even have the gall to complain to regulatory authorities about us. So we think we can solve the problem by limiting a certain type of traffic which competes with one of our other business units.
You can expect VOIP and Youtube to be next.
This is why the Aussie NBN is a good thing, private providers will never upgrade the network if it has a choice.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
Actually, I had to throttle my own P2P traffic for online-gaming to work well. This may be less about the bandwidth used and more about reducing support requests because said gaming does not work well if you have unthrottled P2P running. Personally, I restrict my P2P to 20% of bought bandwidth, and that works very well with DOCSIS 3.0- access.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
The limit is on upload bandwidth, so a peer-to-peer connection from someone within your same area - which should be faster - will now be slower. This means more connections to outside of the immediate area will be preferred because of their speed, increasing the amount of traffic going through the backbone routers. I don't think this measure will help much, but it will piss off some customers and make others pay more.
You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.
You're getting 100mbps, which is unheard of in most parts of the world. You can still surf the web, download shit, do whatever the fuck you want.
But this is slashdot. Let the whining begin.
One affect of this is to undermine the ability of individuals to disseminate data, and force them into the role of data consumers. There is no good technical reason to limit individuals from hosting or distributing data from a personal internet account, other than to place them under the control of larger corporations. I've always felt upload and download speeds should be the same, like they were in the days of modem access.
"The ability to delude yourself may be an important survival tool" - Jane Wagner -
Remind me again why net neutrality is a bad thing?
High speed, super fast 100 megbit speeds (some restrictions apply *[1])
[1]: If you actually try to transfer a lot of data over your high-throughput connection, your effective transfer speed will be reduced back to dialup speeds.
more like fraud/misrepresentation/mis-selling and its wholesale in the sector. Any other item has to be 'as described' and 'fit for purpose'. ofcom let them all of with a slap on the wrist about it because it was 'prevalent' in the industry. As a watchdog with the teeth to do something about it thats unacceptable.
What people don't realize is that they typically only throttle the download. So let's say there's a 10 megabit connection, it's probably 1 or 0.5 megabits upload. So if people have a slowed download, they spend more time uploading the unfinished parts which means more sources which means a faster download on peer to peer networks. So they can do that all they want, they're just basically going to make leechers host files longer.
Google's Super Secret Search Algorithm: SELECT @search_results FROM internet WHERE @search_results = 'good'
Atleast they are admitting to it. Virgin have for a long time openly displayed their traffic management policy (http://www.virginmedia.com/myvirginmedia/faster_upload_traffic_management_table.php) which is very reasonable for all but the most hardcore bandwidth users, and they are regularly upgrading their upload and download speeds, so no crying about using this to avoiding network upgrades. This is all much better than 'fair use' policies or hard bandwidth limits.
Firstly, they've been doing this since before Christmas and it doesn't just affect uploads but does appear to be largely port-based throttling. It's pretty poor at "identifying" P2P traffic and a lot of people have had problems with gaming performance since they started trialling it.
Secondly, this is what happens when you have a race to see who can claim to have the "Fastest home broadband", as has happened in the UK. When Virgin's top package was 10MBit, they didn't have any traffic management in place, but as soon as they jumped it to 20MBit to "beat" the ADSL providers offering 12MBit, they introduced their "STM" system for management and it's only got worse as they've jumped to 50MBit and now 100MBit. Yes, they've been upgrading their network infrastructure, but not fast enough to cope with the "upgrades" in speed that they're offering their users.
Finally, and probably sadly, they still offer one of the better broadband connection packages in the UK because, while they are increasingly crippling your connection for large parts of the day, at least they're open about it and when it's *not* being crippled it's better that 99% of the ADSL alternatives.
I'm pretty sure Virgin have been throttling my connection for years. Many times when I have downloaded several large Linux ISOs (*ahem*), I find my speed cut to a quarter of the advertised value (We pay for 10megabit = 1 megabyte/s, we get throttled to max of 256kbps). This throttle applies to all Internet access; browser, torrents, everything. This policy seems to be something different, but Virgin have been throttling people in some way for years, this announcement seems to imply that they're only just starting to.
i can't believe it. 100M. it is impossible in my country . www.devices.com
Can anyone recommend an alternative ISP with good pings?
I'm sorry, but to us more tech savy folks, a web page or youtube is going to be delivered or watchable at pretty much the same speed no matter if you have 10Mbit or 100Mbit, because more than likely I know I could burn 100Mbit (I am on the 10Mbit package atm) quite easily, but what the heck are we going to be able to use to see a benefit in the 100Mbit speed you can buy
Who is going to buy this crud? Sheeples I expect who just see headline speed figures. If I could get 100Mbit I would use it for p2p and giganews ;) I mean, really, what else is there.
http://www.writeitfor.us - Writing IT for the IT generation.
Ok, no problem. On the other hand starting next month I will be throttling my payments to them to make paying other bills easier. I am sure Virgin will understand.
Oh, I get it. You are jealous and thus Virgin has the right to fuck over people who have more than you.
1) they are throttling upstream, not downstream
2) your theory does not make sense unless people stop uploading the second the download is done
3) even if 2) were not the case, slower uploads what more clients are waiting for don't increase speed; really, they don;t
The last mile is dedicated; the backbone is symmetric.
None of their claims make any sense.
In related news, regulation for even access to vital infrastructure is not strong enough.
Also, Virgin Media is hurt by clinging to an ancient business model.
And that's really all there is to it.
"... is restricted to P2P applications and Newsgroups (which are commonly used to distribute large amounts of data)."
;-)
The first rule of USENET is you do not talk about USENET
Anyone quoted by a reporter knows how little they understand
Don't believe what you read is the truth.
I'm on VM's fibre broadband service (only the basic 10Meg) and I cannot find anything to complain about at all. Sure, if I had more bandwidth then I could probably use it for downloading more things that I'll never get round to listening to, watching or playing as I have a finite amount of time to actually spend doing things.
I remember only a few years ago when I had an ISDN line installed at home as a requirement for work so I could connect to remote client sites directly from Cisco or Nortel routers. I also used this service for my own Internet connection, which meant I was able to bond the 2 channels and get 128Meg clean throughput with almost instantaneous connection from an ISDN modem. Back then the normal modem speed was 28k, and 33.6k was just about happening, but not standardised. My mates thought it was incredible the speed I could get compared to their dial-up lines.
We have progressed so far since then, yet people still moan. Unfortunately bandwidth is not free - no matter how fast it goes to your house, the ISP and then the backbone has limited resources. If we genuinely want the 'net to achieve its true potential as a thing of 'good for humanity', then we will have to accept some form of traffic shaping. Why not throttle the P2P / NNTP traffic during the day, but allow it to ramp up overnight (say 1am -6am while most people in this country are asleep)? There could still be shaping on the pipes out of the UK, so other nations can then determine their own timings for the throttling.
All in all - why must we always moan? We have so much now, yet we are never satisfied.
Their DNS server already blocks torrent.piratebay.org completely (refuses to resolve it).
Their new super-hub won't even let you change the DNS in the router, so you need to manually switch your DNS provider on every device.
of course, piratebay.org works fine - so it looks to an average user like piratebay is working, but the torrents are just broken somehow.
very rude.
Virgin Media et al are somewhat guilty of mismanaging customer expectations (you could blame the market for this - aggressive undercutting, focusing on big numbers in advertising and using "up to", etc), but customers are to blame too.
Having worked for an ISP for nearly a decade which provisioned B2B leased lines and consumer ADSL if said consumers realised how much businesses pay for uncontested guaranteed throughput their eyes would water, suffice to say its considerably more than ~£35 a month.
Consumer broadband works on economies of scale, the principal is that the vast majority of subscribers underutilise their connection (effectively paying more than they need to) and thereby subsidise the minority who ought to be paying a lot more. Getting this balance right is tough and when it works its great, but clearly it is not possible for every consumer paying ~£35 a month to be putting through 100mbit/sec for sustained periods, much less 24/7.
If you want uncontested bandwidth you've got to pay (£hundreds p/m for 2mbit rising to £thousands for 10mbit+) for the privilege, that's just the way it is.
They are going to restrict upload rates even more than they already do ?
In most residential internet connections i have seen there is always an obscene limit on upload rate.
Take the very idea of ADSL for instance, this stuff was designed so that in the long run you can only download (consume) comfortably. My currently upload rate on my ADSL2 connection is a 10th of my download rate. Why? beats me, and of course if I want to have SDSL it is suddenly much more expensive, I dont really care for 15megs download rate if I am crippled to 800k in upload, this is not my idea of the internet. Id much rather limit my download rate to 8megs and get 8megs upload too which I know is possible but the price tag on that is insane especially considering it is only a matter of reassigning channels on the line. I wish ISPs would give you the option to rearrange said channels as per your requirements.
And now virgin is going to cripple the weak upload rate even more ? What is this a joke ? soon we'll use ADSL/Fiber/Cable (I have seen this sort of crippled upload on cable and fiber, even if there is absolutely no justification for it) for downloads and use a 56k analog line for uploads ?
Is this truly the internet we want?
Despite THREE engineer visit their 50Mbps product only works intermittently anyway. I plan to ask them to cancel my contract early, just as soon as I get a BT phoneline back in and I can get regular DSL. I won't miss the speed if I can have some actual goddamn reliability.
It doesn't help that they only offer non-geographic numbers for tech support, which mobile networks charge up to 50p/min to call, on a product which doesn't need the customer to own a landline. Maybe if I called them more from home they'd do better at troubleshooting my problem, but the calls would cost a lot more than the (shitty) service!
Seems to be part of an ongoing trend. They promise the Earth, but are piss-poor at delivering.
The dumbasses took a month to connect my line, due to foot dragging and buck-passing on line faults. It took three visits by BT OpenReach engineers to get the damned thing working. Then the outsourced dumbasses in their account provisioning department misspelt my name in the email address they issued me, and refused to change it ("you would have to cancel your subscription and resubscribe"). The "support" is a joke, but even more so than the rest of the industry, and the "up to" speeds are laughable, especially if you're stuck in a poor coverage area (the Docklands of London) with a street full of warez pups madly downloading at all hours of the day and night.
Fucking boneheads. And not terribly honest ones at that.
I'm a Virgin Customer and for the past Month I've had dog slow internet from 17:00 every day. Basically they over sold 'unlimitted'[sic] packages and their network can't cope at peak times. Why they are allowed to sell services they know they can't deliver and why people can't do their downloading overnight beats me.
Guys, throttling p2p traffic is not the real problem here, let's not get sidetracked. That's what these companies want, they want politicians to think that only people complain that use p2p applications to pirate content.
But the reality is that "p2p" doesn't really have a well-defined meaning, the way they use it is a synonym to "file-sharing" which is utterly misleading. A LOT of other traffic will invariably also be throttled, traffic that might be needed for innovation and shaping the future of the Net. What about if I run Gnunet? Will it be throttled? What about Freenet? Is it throttled? What if I use these networks only for anonymous messaging and forums? Still throttled? Why? What if I write a new application, say a distributed end-to-end client version of Facebook, where the traffic between nodes must of course be encrypted for security reasons. Will this application run un-throttled on the ISPs network? Or, will I have to be a large company and pay lots of $$$ to make a special deal with ISPs?
I'm using Nomachine NX over ssl as a remote desktop tool for connecting from work to my home machine, so I don't have to sync files all the time. If I'm not mistaken, they are a small Italian company (there is also a free version). Will my remote desktop connection still work with acceptable speed? Will it be throttled? Why?
Innovative web innovators and small developers are the ones who will lose most from throttling in the long run. As if the constant danger of falling prey to a frivolous patent troll wasn't already enough to stifle innovation.
My recommendation: Educate your local politician. Ask your ISP A LOT of technical questions like the ones mentioned above. Write them a letter for each and every program you're using that is in some way connected to the Net. Ask them: "Do you throttle traffic from this application?" Ask again the week afterwards, and again a week later. Do not accept automated replies. (And always ask them how to contact their legal department in case "the matter needs further clarification.")
Funnily enough, we got a call yesterday from Virgin, part of which was moaning about out internet usage...
Its very hard to fingerprint an anonymous P2P network like I2P. Not only does it use onion-style routing, but every node also defaults to being a router for the rest of the network. What's more, port selection is random.
Even if they throttled everything flowing directly between ISP blocks, they would still only affect the speed marginally.
The internet is not only for browsing (and for porn).
By throttling dynamic IP addresses, you disrupt direct inter-user (peer to peer) communication.
That will slow down file sharing and that is what the ISP is looking for... but...
That will also disrupt VoIP communication, some of which is currently encrypted and goes through random ports (Skype, anything using ZRTP, etc.). The point of the ISP was to throttle filesharing enough so it doesn't impact VoIP, not to disrupt VoIP too. (Though this may encourage non-encrypted VoIP - anything using RTP, etc. - which may serve the government's agenda).
That will also disrupt on-line gaming, specially when the game is hosted by one of the player. Again, the ISP wanted to throttle filesharing enough so it doesn't impact Gaming, not to disrupt it too. (although this may encourage playing by connecting to corporate servers instead of 3rd party private servers, and may serve big companies' agenda).
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
if the user wants them to. And the users of multiplayer games want them to.
http://rescomp.stanford.edu/~cheshire/rants/Latency.html
That will also disrupt VoIP communication
Which is desirable from an ISP's point of view. Wired ISPs want you to pay for their land line. Wireless ones want you to pay for their airtime.
However, the IP address alone doesn't imply anything about the kind of service
It implies whether or not the user of the IP address is a datacenter or a residence. Otherwise, spam blacklists covering the major dial-up, DSL, and cable ISPs wouldn't work. So an ISP would prioritize connections to datacenters and deprioritize connections to residences.
They're also saying "truly unlimited" which is now no longer true, so even if they change their tagline, they've done a bait-and-switch.
PS Comcast Canda were shown to have congestion 3% of the time when they complained that they HAD to throttle because of bandwidth hogs.
Considering I'm in the process of building a network, I find the topic of FUPs and Bandwidth Management both interesting and of some concern.
As a consumer, I look at it from the perspective of "this is unfair, how dare you throttle my connection", while as a provider, I look at it from the "it's literally impossible to provide superior service at the cost consumers are willing to pay".
It's very true that much of the cost of building a network comes from the last mile - equipment and whatnot is a nominal cost as far as I'm concerned, but bandwidth depends very much on the market in which I'm buying it.
Let's assume for a moment I'm buying on the UK market - if I pay say GBP20,000 per month for a 10gbit/s link between New York, that gives me an effective price of GBP2.50 per megabit (80% utilization). Add to that peering of say GBP1000 per month for a 10gbit/s link which gives us GBP0.125 per megabit. Add equipment and last mile costs of GBP5 per subscriber per month and other overheads of about GBP5 per subscriber per month (being not 100% familiar with wholesale prices in the UK, I can only hypothesize, but I do know the prices where I am, so I'm trying to rationalize in the same way) we can establish that I can not effectively charge less than GBP12.625 + VAT for 1mbit/s if I wanted to make no money - add a 30% markup and we could say about GBP16.50.
Considering Virgin charges about that much for a 10mbit/s line (not counting phone or special offers http://shop.virginmedia.com/broadband/up-to-10mb.html), obviously then, there are various points on the network at which there will be contention. It is my understanding that the UK allows a maximum of 50:1 contention ratio (which in my view is a flawed measurement of network performance, but I digress), which effectively limits the amount of data available to each user to consume.
With the ratio at 50:1, a 1mbit/s user could reasonably expect about 6GB of actual usage if the lines were under heavy utilization - a 25:1 ratio 12GB and 10:1 ratio 30GB. Multiply that by the number of megabits they offer on any given plan, and you can see there what the ISP is expecting each user to use.
I mean, sure, a 10mbit/s plan *could* allow you to download about 3TB in a month, and 100mbit/s 30-odd TB, but that kind of usage is impractical to most people.
Then there is the other argument: if you're using more than a few hundred GBs a month, what are you downloading? Of course it's none of my business as a provider, but it's highly likely that there is a significant amount of pirated material there.
The idea is not so much that each user needs to have capacity available megabit for megabit, but that the network is shared in such a way that it can be utilized effectively, that is, transfers are finished sufficiently fast that the lines are free for other users to do their transfers - as such, 100mbit/s for 35 pounds, as the average consumer willing to pay GBP35-40 for less contention, especially if he is only going to be using 50-100-150GB a month. And why should he pay the same amount as you do for significantly less usage?
Being that Virgin is one of the few ISPs to not have a strict data-cap on their plans, this traffic management seems to be a way of trying to avoid going down that path, and while I disagree with FUPs in principle, I understand that they are necessary at some level. On the other hand, I also disagree with provider's use of "Unlimited". We use the term flat-rate because the meanings are very different - as you can probably guess, "unlimited" pertains to usage, whereas "flat-rate" is all about price.
At the end of the day, if you're really so desperate to saturate the lines 24/7, perhaps you should be offered either a pay-as-you-go usage plan, free of traffic management (if the provider charged a nominal amount for the infrastructure, then say 10p per GB), because the next alternative is that you should buy a dedicated line of some kind.
Founder & COO, Hayai India (hayai.in) / USA (hayaibroadband.com)