Virgin Media to dump neutrality and target BitTorrent users

JBod

JBod

JBod

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Ok now I am worried that El Reg is updated by OCUK users :p :

My post yesterday:
http://forums.overclockers.co.uk/showpost.php?p=13094615&postcount=57
jbod said:
Rumours are they are going to dump STM altogether and start using deep packet inspection hardware to simply throttle specific types of traffic (bittorrent etc...).
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The Register Today:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/12/16/virgin_bittorrent/

el reg said:
It's deep packet inspection, but it's not for Phorm...

The UK's second largest ISP, Virgin Media, will next year introduce network monitoring technology to specifically target and restrict BitTorrent traffic, its boss has told The Register.
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Exclusive my ass ;) Spooky :eek:
 
Torrents are rubbish and for noobs so who cares ? the last place I'll look for something is via torrents.

When they start restricting their news servers is when everyone should start worrying.

This is great news it means all the noob leechers cant steal my bandwidth anymore.
 
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Virgin have actually been monitoring peer to peer activity for a while now.
As can be expected from the Register, it's neither really news (as Virgin have had to notify all their affected customers) nor paricularly accurate/relevant.
 
C64 said:
Torrents are rubbish and for noobs so who cares ? the last place I'll look for something is via torrents.

When they start restricting their news servers is when everyone should start worrying.

This is great news it means all the noob leechers cant steal my bandwidth anymore.
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It's still a worrying sign for things to come. If it starts with torrents and then moves on to other things (newsgroups, eventually FTP, VOIP, etc) I'm sure we'll become a lot more bothered.

Personally it's a reason for me to never go to VM again. I don't use torrents much these days but now and again they're handy.
 
Lots of legit things do use torrents, for example blizzard uses torrents for WoW patches. The majority of torrent traffic though is imo less then legal, and all this will do is force a lot of the heavy downloaders from torrents (which are a perfectly good means of transfering stuff), onto usenet. This will make some usenet newservers happy like giganews as it could mean more customers, and so more money. For current usenet users on VM though, it just means that it will become more likely that they will do the exact same thing to usenet somewhere down the line too.

C64 said:
Torrents are rubbish and for noobs so who cares ? the last place I'll look for something is via torrents.
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Just because you dont like torrents doesn't mean they are a perfectly good means to distribute files. I use torrents myself, and with a short space of time it maxes my internet connection, and unlike usenet its simpler to use and best of all free.
 
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Torrents suck won't touch them now with the risks involved, if peeps can't pay a small amount a month for usenet ( like £7) which is secure with SSL then i got no sympathy if they get caught out.
 
Jabbs said:
Torrents suck won't touch them now with the risks involved, if peeps can't pay a small amount a month for usenet ( like £7) which is secure with SSL then i got no sympathy if they get caught out.
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Usenet access wont help any WoW players trying to download the patch.
 
From a rumor being spread a few months ago this is VM extending the application management policies they apply to their ADSL customers to cable. So while the example given is torrents, if and when it comes in it may well affect other protocols too.

Taken from the Virgin.net traffic management pages:

What is the 'Application Management' and how it works?
During peak periods, we also reserve the right to manage the amount of bandwidth dedicated to certain applications (such as Peer-to-Peer file sharing) and this is what we call 'Application Management'. Controlling the amount of bandwidth used by certain applications helps us provide the best possible experience for the majority of our customers.

As part of our Acceptable Usage Policy, we make sure that we only apply this to certain applications, so that we don't interrupt anything you might be doing. For example, Peer-to-Peer file sharing uses applications that tend to take up a huge amount of bandwidth downloading and uploading in the background. This means it can carry on operating with a (temporarily) reduced bandwidth allocation.
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Jabbs said:
Torrents suck won't touch them now with the risks involved, if peeps can't pay a small amount a month for usenet ( like £7) which is secure with SSL then i got no sympathy if they get caught out.
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£7 per month is a lot. for most people that's more than 40% of what they pay for their connection on top just to DL publically available files.

Torrents are a very cleverly designed way to efficiently maintain high availability of widely requested files. It cuts down the need for hefty centralised hosting which keeps it's dependant services cheap. Arguably one of the most inivative methods of mass data distribution we've seen so far. The proportion of priated stuff isn't actually that big compared to the amount of freeware and opensource available via torrents.
To imply that torrents were created to serve the needs of warez kiddies is a very wide and quite off the mark generalisation
 
It's a guarantee they will target Usenet after Bitorrent which would be a shame, remember Traxdata a few months ago he warned us all that Application throtttling would be coming and yet again as with all his information in the past he is correct,

As posted by Traxdata on the 26th of June 2008

"Ok,

As a certain someone has nagged me about this...and others wanting to know where the future holds for VM as far as this goes.

As i have mentioned a few weeks or so back VM have been trialling application throttling/management in lab 3 (for those interested, this is just a name to represent the area where the trial is going on, not an actual lab)

Currently through the trial Usenet ports (including SSL) are throttled (reducing speeds down to 512k)

This, is, as far as one is aware going to be used for both in and out of peak hours for whoever they see "fit" as a heavy user.

I'm sure some of you noticed "Allot" was mentioned in another thread on here and i've had a few people asking me what this is.

It's currently what VM are using to trial application/throttling/management and is to be deployed across the VM network fully sometime either third quarter 2008 or first quarter 2009, the dates are unknown/rough ideas right now as things are being kept quiet over @ VM headquarters.

Now before any of you shout at me or anything i wasnt going to release this information until *certain people within VM* thought it would be amusing to try and release information about me on certain sites, and no this is not revenge on them, but i have had a few people asking me to release this information.

Anyway...you can view more about Allot over at http://www.allot.com/index.php?optio...&id=2&Itemid=4

I would note there is ALSO a seperate trial going on while controls ports speciifcally for games (Wow etc) which affect the pings for said games.

I will add more information to this thread over the coming weeks (i have a lot going on right now, so dont moan about lack of info just yet)

Just to add, this will be a part of their FUP and completely seperate to STM."


Then came Virgin's response to his post, the usual response of deny and lie only to implement it anyways.


"Our policy does not discriminate internet traffic by application and we have no plans to do so. Whilst we do use equipment from Allot within parts of our cable network, this is used to build usage metrics and does not affect customers’ service in any way. It is certainly not used to do any form of packet shaping or change internet traffic priorities"


how many more lies to Virgin have to tell before their fanboys wake up.
 
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We may as well just go for the cheapest connection then seeimg nothing can be done with it :(

Anyone else feel we are goimg backwards with internet connections? Time to dig out those dial up modems ;)
 
Maybe a way to esure 50Mb is a winner, push all the "heavy" users to DOCSIS3 network which can cope better.

HEADRAT
 
Fantastic news, about time the scourge that is BT was targetted directly.

It's the upstream aspect of it which is so damaging, particularly to the cable networks, as all the kids leave their BT clients running 24/7, saturating their upstream bandwidth to give them a good "ratio" or whatever it's called these days.

Such P2P applications are murdering the networks and either have to be seriously curtailed or else our bills are going to go through the roof to pay for the vast infrastructure improvements required to deal with it.

As for this "spreading" from BT/P2P to things like Usenet, I see no reason why it should. Usenet is downstream only and such bandwidth is cheap compare to upstream. One thing it could affect is the BBC iPlayer which is also a P2P application. A lot of ISPs have been very unimpressed with the huge additional load this application has put on their networks and I can't say I blame them. Why should the BBC be able to use the ISPs networks as a free distribution system without paying a penny towards its use? I can foresee a future where things like iPlayer are blocked unless you pay an additional premium to unblock it.
 
Vertigo1 said:
I can foresee a future where things like iPlayer are blocked unless you pay an additional premium to unblock it.
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I can't see how they could levy a fee on a free service, I think that would be a step too far, otherwise what is your download bandwith for?
 
It's not a free service - it's paid for by the licence fee. Why should the ISPs networks have to bear the brunt of the increased traffic that results from it when they're getting no additional revenue from the viewer or the BBC? How is that fair?
 
I agree that p2p is a resource hog, but the worry is that they will look to throttle ALL traffic especially anything that can be used to download large amounts of data regardless of wether you need to upload like usenet where you are not forced to upload. They just keep on lying, we all know what is going to happen, when there is a full roll out, the usual magical numbers of so called abusive downloaders will be blamed, and the same old people will believe Virgin, Virgin have already started the lies by saying along the lines of, we will assess how users use the service and decide how to implement STM based on that, it's Virgin speak for "we will wait until we have oversubscribed the service then we will implement STM, then blame it on heavy users again".
 
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