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Virgin Media UK Begins Throttling P2P Traffic

Posted by Soulskill on from the jig-is-up dept.

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)."

7 of 220 comments (clear)

  1. welp.... by CSFFlame · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

    1. Re:welp.... by strack · · Score: 4, Insightful

      i think you mean they can sell good speeds to everyone by "fucking lying like the lying bastards they are". and connecting you to "kinda sorta parts of the internet that we approve of" and you are right. bandwidth isnt free, which is why people *buy* the internet service that is *advertised*, and anything else is theft by deception. what we call 'fraud'

  2. Translation by mjwx · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.
    1. Re:Translation by wjh31 · · Score: 4, Informative

      Virgin media have just finished rolling out 50Mbps download, just started rolling out 100Mbps. and are in the process of doubling their upload speeds, so I call bull on you.

    2. Re:Translation by Chocky2 · · Score: 4, Informative

      I think you may have been listening to BT's marketing department too much if you think the problems lie with Virgin not upgrading their network, being oversubscribed, or offering poor performance.

      Last week's Ofcom report on broadband speeds

  3. Welcome to the new improved internet by mysidia · · Score: 5, Funny

    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.

  4. "overselling" it by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.