Virgin Media to dump neutrality and target BitTorrent users

[Ignitionnet]

Originally Posted by hoohim

bang goes that idea then

Not really sir, I am almost 100% certain that VM have settlement free peering, IE they aren't paying per Mbit/s for traffic to their outsourced news service.

They likely pay a wodge of cash each month for access to the news service and that's it.

[Rik]

Originally Posted by TheDon

Anyone that thinks residential broadband should be a gaurenteed level of service is living in cloud cuckoo land..

Bravo!

I must agree with every single post you have made on this thread.

Lots of extremely good and valid points

[Stabhappy]

Originally Posted by Broadbandings

Not really sir, I am almost 100% certain that VM have settlement free peering, IE they aren't paying per Mbit/s for traffic to their outsourced news service.

They likely pay a wodge of cash each month for access to the news service and that's it.

I think that the original idea is that there would be less external peering, more internal, which as a concept is flawed to start with unless ideas such as P4P come into play. But that doesnt apply to newsgroups ;/

[cook1984]

Originally Posted by Gary L

I'm with you all the way, and agree with you. but the fact is there is no STM on the 50Mb at this time. so complaining about an ad which will be changed when STM is introduced is a waste of time.

I believe it is reasonable grounds for a complaint. It's known as Bait and Switch.

VM offer one thing to entice you in. Unlimited 50 meg. No mention of any STM or limits. I bet if you call them and ask they will swear blind that it is never going to happen.

Once they have you locked in to an 18 month contract though, that's when they pull the switch and reduce your service by 85% or more.

PC World got in trouble for this very same thing several times. Advertise a really cheap laptop on TV, but when you get to the store it's sold out because they only had one or two, but wait perhaps you would be interested in this more expensive one now you are here...

If anyone decided to get 50 meg, remember to call VM and get them to confirm that there will be no STM/throtting/management/prioritisation of any kind during your 18 month contract. Record the call and keep a copy safe. That way when they introduce it you can get out of your contract. I'm tempted to do it myself and just try to download the whole god damn internet in those few months before it kicks in, since it looks like they are going to hammer everyone later on.

---------- Post added at 00:12 ---------- Previous post was at 00:09 ----------

Originally Posted by Stabhappy

I think that the original idea is that there would be less external peering, more internal, which as a concept is flawed to start with unless ideas such as P4P come into play. But that doesnt apply to newsgroups ;/

PeerCache has been around for years. P2P caching has been around for years, and is totally legal in the same way that web caches are.

[Rik]

Originally Posted by cook1984

VM offer one thing to entice you in. Unlimited 50 meg. No mention of any STM or limits. I bet if you call them and ask they will swear blind that it is never going to happen.

I rang VM on the day it was announced and was told "Yes there would be STM once it was completely rolled out"

So a very honest answer there.



I mean does anyone expect a 50Mb completely unlimited line for £51 or less, come on peeps lets be serious, bandwidth costs a lot more than that

Originally Posted by Rik

I rang VM on the day it was announced and was told "Yes there would be STM once it was completely rolled out"

So a very honest answer there.

May we ask who told you that?

[TheDon]

Originally Posted by i-Set

I think if more people complained then VM would not get away with all their advertising gimmicks, lets face it, vm broadband is not unlimited now isit, because you are limited to a certain amount of data you can download before BANG your stopped to x mb which is not what you agreed to pay for...you look at other countries with cable broadband and they do not have all these problems do they?

They're allowed to call it unlimited as long as there's no hard cap on the amount you can download.

If STM was a "Download x amount then you get cut off" it isn't unlimited, as it's a "download x amount then download as much as you like at a slower speed" it is classed as unlimited, even though the amount you can download at that speed is lower.

The issue comes with the definition of unlimited, all connections are limited, they just simply can't download more than the speed lets them, so "unlimited" has come to mean "as much as you can download at the connection speed we give you" rather than actually being unlimited (as that's impossible).

Originally Posted by cook1984

Being an IT outfit we pulled a lot of bandwidth. Drivers, applications, Windows Updates (200MB+ on a fresh Vista SP1 install) etc so at about 9:30AM we were automatically pushed onto the "slow pipe" with all the other "bandwidth hogs".

It was so bad we couldn't even browse the web, let alone download anything. Our business ground to a halt. We called our ISP and spent three hours complaining and demanding the service we paid for before they put us back on the "fast pipe". It was still as slow as it ever was, but at least we could work.

Your business deserved it for being an "IT outfit" that doesn't know even the basics of doing fresh installs. Any "IT outfit" that has to download windows updates more than once is a joke that shouldn't be in business.

I've done tens of thousands of fresh installs, and every single one of them comes online with every patch up to the start of the month already installed and never touches windows update, because I know how to slipstream patch files into an install CD and know that sitting around waiting for windows update to download patches is not the best use of my time. If your company used windows update daily then you had fundamental problems in the running of it, and a slow internet connection should have been the least of your worries.

[Ignitionnet]

Originally Posted by Rik

I mean does anyone expect a 50Mb completely unlimited line for £51 or less, come on peeps lets be serious, bandwidth costs a lot more than that

You'd best tell UPC this

http://www.upc.nl/internet/fiber_power/

---------- Post added at 14:59 ---------- Previous post was at 14:55 ----------

I've had a bit more of a think about this.

It's not necessarily a bad thing so long as the following are done:

1) It applies to upstream only.
2) It's only employed to avert congestion, if the network is not near congestion point traffic flows normally.
3) Tier upload is uplifted as follows:

10Mbit: 512kbps -> 1Mbit
20Mbit: 768kbps -> 2Mbit
50Mbit: 1.5Mbit -> 5Mbit

Giving a 10:1 ratio on all products.

4) STM is removed.

UPC are using 6.4MHz wide 16QAM upstreams, total bandwidth 20.48Mbit usable around 17.6Mbit to deliver 10 and 6Mbit upstreams on their products, VM could also use that modulation and width merrily.

[Fatec]

Originally Posted by Broadbandings

You'd best tell UPC this

http://www.upc.nl/internet/fiber_power/

And Free

http://www.free.fr/fibre-optique/index.html

And Orange

http://abonnez-vous.orange.fr/Fibre/...spx?idnode=550

[lightboy]

I mean does anyone expect a 50Mb completely unlimited line for £51 or less, come on peeps lets be serious, bandwidth costs a lot more than that

err yes £51 is extortionate amount to pay ..
there are several isp's who can offer 24MB (with 1.5-2.5mb upload) adsl with no stm for around £20
virgin charge way more than that for stm'd 20MB (with 768k upload)
when 50MB type speed is available on dsl platform i reckon average price will be in the 30-40 quid range ..


oh and as for the bitorrent thing they already seem to be doing that as even when i have got like millions of seeds and peers best d/l speed i have
ever had on any file was about 200KB's and ive got XL (i.e. 10% of available bandwidth) same goes for emule limewire etc..
only way i get full speed is payed newserver or rapidshare premium ..

[Toto]

Originally Posted by TheDon

I've done tens of thousands of fresh installs, and every single one of them comes online with every patch up to the start of the month already installed and never touches windows update, because I know how to slipstream patch files into an install CD and know that sitting around waiting for windows update to download patches is not the best use of my time. If your company used windows update daily then you had fundamental problems in the running of it, and a slow internet connection should have been the least of your worries.

[gunner45]

Originally Posted by lightboy

err yes £51 is extortionate amount to pay ..
there are several isp's who can offer 24MB (with 1.5-2.5mb upload) adsl with no stm for around £20
virgin charge way more than that for stm'd 20MB (with 768k upload)

You have to compare like with like.

You usually get close to VM's speed because of fibre to the cabinets.

But offerings of 24mbps are unrealistic as you practically need to be next door the the exchange to get that. Where I live gives me 13mbps at the most, so I'm not tempted by anything from Be or other ADSL2+ providers.

[Fatec]

Originally Posted by gunner45

You have to compare like with like.

You usually get close to VM's speed because of fibre to the cabinets.

But offerings of 24mbps are unrealistic as you practically need to be next door the the exchange to get that. Where I live gives me 13mbps at the most, so I'm not tempted by anything from Be or other ADSL2+ providers.

I'd rather get 13Mbit unrestricted than have 20Mbit with all day STM

[Impz2002]

Originally Posted by TheDon

I've done tens of thousands of fresh installs, and every single one of them comes online with every patch up to the start of the month already installed and never touches windows update, because I know how to slipstream patch files into an install CD and know that sitting around waiting for windows update to download patches is not the best use of my time. If your company used windows update daily then you had fundamental problems in the running of it, and a slow internet connection should have been the least of your worries.

Bravo , well said ! you speak nothing but sense my friend !

Impz

---------- Post added at 16:50 ---------- Previous post was at 16:47 ----------

Originally Posted by lightboy

err yes £51 is extortionate amount to pay ..
there are several isp's who can offer 24MB (with 1.5-2.5mb upload) adsl with no stm for around £20
virgin charge way more than that for stm'd 20MB (with 768k upload)
when 50MB type speed is available on dsl platform i reckon average price will be in the 30-40 quid range ....

I think you are overlooking one very vital piece of info there. Most people on ADSL lines cannot receive the 24meg connection as they live too far from the exchange. Unless you live next door to the exchange you wont get anywhere near those speeds in real life conditions. VM's 50meg is not affected by distance and is therefore a vastly superior product !

Impz

[TheDon]

Originally Posted by lightboy

err yes £51 is extortionate amount to pay ..
there are several isp's who can offer 24MB (with 1.5-2.5mb upload) adsl with no stm for around £20
virgin charge way more than that for stm'd 20MB (with 768k upload)
when 50MB type speed is available on dsl platform i reckon average price will be in the 30-40 quid range ..


oh and as for the bitorrent thing they already seem to be doing that as even when i have got like millions of seeds and peers best d/l speed i have
ever had on any file was about 200KB's and ive got XL (i.e. 10% of available bandwidth) same goes for emule limewire etc..
only way i get full speed is payed newserver or rapidshare premium ..

Missing the point.

You can get a connection that is capable of that speed yes. You can't however pay for that much constant bandwidth for that price. Transit costs for the ISP are way more than that £51 for 50Mb/s. You're also ignoring that that price is BB alone, you can get 50meg + phone line for £46. That brings it nicely into the 30-40 quid range you'd expect from ADSL.

They also aren't slowing BT, I max 20meg on it easily, I'd suggest the issues are either with you having firewall/router issues, or downloading from badly seeded torrents. I use torrents (legal ofc) with seed:leecher ratios of over 20:1, and never have a problem pulling max speed from them.