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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Oh, I get it. You are jealous and thus Virgin has the right to fuck over people who have more than you.
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.")