Virgin Media to dump neutrality and target BitTorrent users

[Gary L]

Originally Posted by Xan

The only reason i am with VM is to download films, game, demos and so on at a cost of £25 a month if that goes i will move to sky and pay the same price and get a package off them with free internet or pay £10 slower speed but i get that with VM as i download at peak when i am on my comp.

And there are many more like you that use it for the very same reasons. there are many more that do use it for what you can call illegal purposes. if Virgin were honest they would say that they are the people who are keeping them in business.

Berkett forgets this, and seems to think just waving his willy is what will keep him afloat.

Other ISPs will soon be taking advantage of where Virgin are getting too big for their boots and going wrong when it comes to what a customer wants and expects from an internet connection in the 21st century. and it's not 50Mb and over Mother of all broadband speeds.

^^^^^ beautiful, took the words out of my mouth

[Bonglet]

I preached the same words 2 years ago gary l never got listened to then and sure they arent listening now.
When the real advertising kicks in about all this hoo and haa word of mouth from customers especially in these economic times see how many customers desert vm they had there warnings over this and other matters long ago.

Now they as a company want to be internet dictators and use the internet to moneterise there customer and or there data (as said in same statment by vm).

How will all this happen when people will desert in droves?

[AppleSauce]

I hate people who seed their torrents all day, if people are so intent on seeding then buy a dedicated server in some random country and do it right, wish people wouldn't bog down Virgins network for the rest of us with their seeding habits.

[TheDon]

Originally Posted by Gary L

And there are many more like you that use it for the very same reasons. there are many more that do use it for what you can call illegal purposes. if Virgin were honest they would say that they are the people who are keeping them in business.

Berkett forgets this, and seems to think just waving his willy is what will keep him afloat.

Other ISPs will soon be taking advantage of where Virgin are getting too big for their boots and going wrong when it comes to what a customer wants and expects from an internet connection in the 21st century. and it's not 50Mb and over Mother of all broadband speeds.

Only one problem with this line of thought, they don't make any money off heavy p2p users. Heavy p2p users infact cost them money.

If all the heavy downloaders left VM they'd have a lower revenue sure, but their costs would decrease by a great deal more.

This is what people just don't understand, someone who rarely downloads large amounts of data is worth 20x as much to VM as someone who always does.

The people that don't download subsidise the ones that do. Saying that the heavy downloaders are the ones keeping the company afloat is ridiculous, they're the ones who cost the company the most.

Some people seriously overestimate their worth to the company. This is why Berkett doesn't really care about ****ing off the big downloaders, he'd secretely quite like it if they all left VM.

As for the issue of what they're advertising 50meg for, people using legitimate HD streaming and download services cost VM a lot less than people downloading with p2p. Not all traffic is created equal, and p2p traffic is quite expensive because it's nearly always external transit traffic to other ISPs worldwide. A legitimate service like iplayer for instance, will have direct peering to VM which costs significantly less. If all the p2p traffic was replaced with hosted services with direct peering to VM then VMs transit costs would drop significantly.

It's not that VM can't supply the bandwidth (Berkett was right in saying they're not bandwidth constrained), it's that the type of bandwidth p2p uses is relatively expensive.

[SimonB79]

At the end of the day if u aint happy then sod off and go elsewhere.... and maybe then us normal users might get a better service... Hell... I use my consoles / computers online all the time and hardly ever hit the STM limits....

Go and download ya 500gig a day torrent crap elsewhere LOL

(Im sure the other ISPs will welcome u bandwidth hogs with open arms... i don't think.)

[broadbandbug]

Originally Posted by Fatec

Any of you suprised? Any of you really believed what neil said about allot just being used for network monitoring/data purposes? oh where oh where is broadbandbug to deny new allot equipment was installed when it's been admitted.

The trials have been going on for quite some time, i'm suprised no one noticed their torrent speeds going to hell, and i should note, he quotes it's about bandwith and not bittorrent in general, DPI is gonna be going after anything using high amounts of bandwith, that newsgroups too.

I am still here.. I told you before.. I don't know anything about any of the trials.. It is not an area I have anything to do with..
I am aware of a music download project.. That is it I am afraid.. I don't profess to know everything that is going on inside VM

[Gary L]

Originally Posted by TheDon

Only one problem with this line of thought, they don't make any money off heavy p2p users. Heavy p2p users infact cost them money.

If all the heavy downloaders left VM they'd have a lower revenue sure, but their costs would decrease by a great deal more.

But they still need the income from the heavy users as much as they do from the not heavy users. those that only use their connection for email and browsing will subsidise those that make heavy use of theirs.

Virgin need to sell the higher priced connections, but when you make it clear that you are making it as unuseable as possible with many restrictions imposed, then it won't sell. and there will be nobody buying them and everyone not focussing on the speed aspect anymore, but a connection with not so many restrictions tied to it.

[highroyds]

http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/200...-media-de.html

Virgin Media Denies BitTorrent Throttling Report

[Frank]

Originally Posted by TheDon

If traffic shaping is in effect then yes, it is overloaded. They don't limit for the sake of limiting (it doesn't have to be at the UBR either, it could just as easily be at the external peering point).

Well VM may not, but other ISPs that use DPI do. And there is no question about it. I know, I am on one where the uplink is throttled by the wholesale provider, and my Torrent speeds drops to 40KBs EVERY DAY between 6pm and 1am. Yet I can open up a browser and download a file at 300-400KBs, so there is clearly bandiwdth available. That is LIMITING FOR THE SAKE OF LIMITING, so people better hope that VM does not do that.

[General Maximus]

lmao, they are denying it now because they know that nobody is going to sign up for 50mbit knowing that they aren't going to be able to use it for what they want to use it for. VM can deny it all they want but i think we all know from experience that they are lieing through their teeth and we can all expect to be screwed this time next year.

[Frank]

Originally Posted by TheDon

I'll repeat it again, it's simply NOT VIABLE to offer a truely unlimited service. The costs involved with providing transit out to the internet, the costs of the internal infrastructure, the costs of supporting it, are all far too high to ever beable to offer a truely unlimited service at residential broadband prices.

Nobody said it should be a truly unlimited service. Everyone acknowledges the bandwidth caps that are in place. Given those caps are in place, there is no reason why one should not be able to use the bandwidth they have paid for, for whatever they want, at the maximum speed of the service that is being sold. Period.

[Gary L]

Originally Posted by highroyds

http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/200...-media-de.html

Virgin Media Denies BitTorrent Throttling Report

Virgin deny everything. it's only till it's actually implemented that it's proved they were lying about denying it.
things don't just happen overnight. they are planned and trialled long before the event.

Truth is nobody wants to take the 50Mb when Virgin have been saying what restrictions they are going to apply to it once it's flying out the window.

Berkett and his big mouth!

[sk8er_boi6000]

Originally Posted by SimonB79

If this new system gives Gamer Traffic priority over Bit-torrent then I'm all for it.

(Its about time this was introduced.... people are killing the bandwidth by running torrent servers 24 / 7 and everyone else is suffering put em at the bottom of the pile that's what I say.)

Linux distros my ARSE... dodgy porn & pirate software more like

These Torrent Bandits are probably the same people that leave their water taps running constantly and cause water shortages.

You are quiet simply an ignoramus, go onto the internet, have a look at all the legitimate uses for Bittorrent technology and then have a think about your attitude.

Hell how do we know you aren't using your connection to cheat in games, and hack game servers? we can all sit here throwing stupid allegations at each other with no factual backup

I guess it's ok for content providers to cut their bandwidth costs but not ISPs? This is essentially the crux of the issue when it comes to net neutrality, the content providers want to do everything in their power to cut their costs and to offload them to others (the ISP) yet don't want to pay the ISPs to contribute to the cost of updating their infrastructure to cope with the added bandwidth usage. ISPs are quite legitimately annoyed at this, and as they can't pass on increased costs to the consumer (as the consumer has no appetite for price rises) they have to implement QoS to make best use of what they have.

There is a simple difference there, makers of free software don't rake in the money like ISP's do, they rely on free distribution media to get their work to the public, and Linux/BSD have an important place in the computing world as it is the only truly free OS option available to those short of money. Do you genuinely think it is fair to penalise these people just because they can't afford datacenters with the copious amounts of bandwidth needed to distribute multi gigabyte Linux images? These people have the same rights, hell your gaming doesn't even contribute anything to society but Linux does (for the record I use Windows on all my rigs before someone tries to tar me with the FSF humper brush)

The internal network is more than capable of the speeds, as are likely a fair amount of their peering connections. That doesn't mean that all are though, and there will be congestion at points in the network, at these points traffic has to be prioritised, and very low priority traffic (such as ICMP) gets dropped, low priority stuff gets held back, and high priority time critical stuff gets pushed ahead.

As Virgin are saying they can DELIVER these speeds, then it is fair to assume they could deliver it to the home, making your argument void.

[InfiniteBiscuit]

This Neil Berkett character's a good laugh, ain't he?

Am I the only one who pictures him as a maniacal bond like villian?