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)."

Comments

Corporate Loyalty

[tobiah]

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.