Boy, streaming video and p2p - I bet those took the ISPs by surprise. They've had forever to position their services/prices accordingly for changing usage without having to do drastic sweeps.
Virgin Media to dump neutrality and target BitTorrent users
- Thread starter JBod
- Start date
The money I pay for my 20Mbps connection is to provide bandwidth to just such a service, if I've paid my money for my connection surely I should be able to use it?
How is it "fair" to take my service and start throttling/shaping etc it, if Virgin get there way I won't be able to use it for anything!
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Thats like saying why shouldn't google, or youtube or any other website pay ISPs. The ISP is paid to provide you with an internet connection for you to do with it what you like.
as long as what your are doing is legal
Thats the biggest problem to me. They cant tell whats legit, so lets block everything. (90% wont be, even that figure might be a bit low)
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Total BS and Scaremongering by someone starting rumours IMO.
QUOTED:
" December 16, 2008:
Virgin Media, the British internet service provider that just announced a 50 megabits per second broadband service, is denying a Tuesday published report that it plans to throttle BitTorrent traffic as a congestion management plan.
"It's not true," Asam Ahmad, a company spokesman, said in telephone interview from London. "There are no changes planned in our traffic management policy."
The Register reported Tuesday that Neil Berkett, the company's CEO, said the throttling was to come in mid-2009. The Register's story did not quote Berkett directly. "
http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/2008/12/virgin-media-de.html
QUOTED:
" December 16, 2008:
Virgin Media, the British internet service provider that just announced a 50 megabits per second broadband service, is denying a Tuesday published report that it plans to throttle BitTorrent traffic as a congestion management plan.
"It's not true," Asam Ahmad, a company spokesman, said in telephone interview from London. "There are no changes planned in our traffic management policy."
The Register reported Tuesday that Neil Berkett, the company's CEO, said the throttling was to come in mid-2009. The Register's story did not quote Berkett directly. "
http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/2008/12/virgin-media-de.html
then they will have to find another way of getting their legit stuff
lol
I guess they'll be updating that soon enough. "Once we've throttled the speed to 1kb a second you'll wonder why all your friends use it".
http://www.virginmedia.com/digital/digitalhome/advancedguides/bittorrent.php
If it's a true at all. Which by the Wired story it isn't.
they offer a service there own fault, do you see them charging for youtube, a company in 2007 used the same amount of bandwidth in 2005 all they dont want to do is spend there 3 billion or 24 billion to upgrade their network!!!
Associate
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Because they charge you for the connection and you have a bandwidth allowance included in that. IF they don't have the bandwidth to cope with it, it's their own fault for not charging people enough.
As for torrenters "stealing my bandwidth" your Home connections are contended at 50:1 for most ISPs the system is designed that way by the ISPs to cut costs. People have always been stealing your bandwidth since the dawn of broadband, if you want your full speed all the time you have to pay for a 1:1 contended line. That's how the world is.
If you buy a Fiat Punto no matter how much you whine about it you don't have a Lamborghini.
Well said. So many people forget that there are many legitimate uses for torrents.
There are those who dont realize there are websites that host the patch themselves. A lot of people simply run wow and let it automaticaly update and do its own thing.
then wouldn't you agree that now is a good time to become internet compitent?
Because I pay the ISP to provide me with a service. Why should the BBC pay the ISPs to deal with this traffic when that's what we are paying them for?
Oh and I've never used torrents and never plan to
.er torrents are for legit things aswell it wasnt even a protocol designed for illegal downloading.
WArhamer online uses torrents for its patchs as does WOW
a lot of people probably dont realise this because both clients have there own torrent client built in. (you can extract torrent info and use a regular bitorent client to download the patchs)
a lot of game open BETA's use torrents these days aswell
i'd suspect bbci player downloads are based off the bitotorrent code and i'd bet channel 4's download thing is to
you cant find it on a website the instant wow gets a patch though same with WAR they only do the torrent to there client you cant download any patchs on thw warhammer website at all
Last edited:
The offical wow website doesn't host patches for normal forms of downloading, but there are many mirror sites not run by blizzard that do host patches within several min of them going live. I dont know about WAR, but i assume its not too different.
My problem is that people shouldn't have to seek out this alternatives just because an ISP decides to limit torrent traffic. The default way of patching is fine for a lot of people, but if this rumor about limiting torrent traffic is true then it will cause problems for both wow and war players (along with any legit uses for torrents). There is simply no need for it, doing this will not solve any problems.
Were VM ever strictly "net neutral" in the first place? (are any?).
I say that because if you're "net neutral" you're not allowed to interfere with any network traffic in any sort of targeted manner- NTL/VM have been blocking certain ports used only by virus's for years (from memory they started with the blaster worm*), and most/all ISP's treat ping packets as "drop first"
I would much rather the targetted approach to dealing with heavy users affecting the network at peak times, than the blunderbuss approach of STM affecting anyone who downloads an arbitary amount regardless of current network load (STM doesn't take into account how much load the network is under at that moment, so can lead to people being affected when there is no need, or not working well when there is the need).
What we, as consumers pay for our VM BB connections would just about cover maybe 1-2mbit of constant use from what i've read, something I can quite believe.
Personally even if VM did start doing this, as long as it's done sensibly - ie dynamically depending on network conditions it could work out very well, as it might mean they are able to do away with STM, or at least reduce how much the STM affects us, and ensure that the types of traffic that actually require a decent speed still get it - I would prefer for my torrent to take 45 minutes to finish instead of 30, if it meant that my connection for gaming remained good.
*IIRC they set up the network to put infected users into a specific ip range where they could only download the cleaner/security patch for the worm, and got a message displayed to that affect.
I say that because if you're "net neutral" you're not allowed to interfere with any network traffic in any sort of targeted manner- NTL/VM have been blocking certain ports used only by virus's for years (from memory they started with the blaster worm*), and most/all ISP's treat ping packets as "drop first"
I would much rather the targetted approach to dealing with heavy users affecting the network at peak times, than the blunderbuss approach of STM affecting anyone who downloads an arbitary amount regardless of current network load (STM doesn't take into account how much load the network is under at that moment, so can lead to people being affected when there is no need, or not working well when there is the need).
What we, as consumers pay for our VM BB connections would just about cover maybe 1-2mbit of constant use from what i've read, something I can quite believe.
Personally even if VM did start doing this, as long as it's done sensibly - ie dynamically depending on network conditions it could work out very well, as it might mean they are able to do away with STM, or at least reduce how much the STM affects us, and ensure that the types of traffic that actually require a decent speed still get it - I would prefer for my torrent to take 45 minutes to finish instead of 30, if it meant that my connection for gaming remained good.
*IIRC they set up the network to put infected users into a specific ip range where they could only download the cleaner/security patch for the worm, and got a message displayed to that affect.