Virgin Media to dump neutrality and target BitTorrent users

[Raistlin]

Play nicely people

[Frank]

I can't say that denial holds much water for me either. The idea that you would purchase expensive, high end Allot DPI Technology purely to "understand the way people use our broadband service" is not particularly plausible, given the feature set of the technology. I note that the use of this technology has changed from "understanding" to the quoted claim that DPI technology will be used to "monetise the intelligence" of the network. Seems like a fair shift to me.

Anyways, I look forward to The Register clarification

[Chicken]

Does anyone know whats happening/not happening? According to http://www.techwatch.co.uk/2008/12/1...-virgin-media/

This is because at some point during next year they will be looking to revise their policies on broadband with the view to blocking torrent sites and other P2P outlets.

Hmmm.. so now its blocking torrent sites eh?... the plot thickens.

[TheDon]

Originally Posted by Gary L

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.

No, they don't need their income because the income from them is offset by the costs they bring.

Not everyone on 20mb is a heavy user, most just like being able to download quickly when they need to, others just have it because it's part of their package.

When you're on about heavy users you're talking about less than the top 5%. These people could leave and make a dent in VM's revenue, but take a massive slice out of their transit costs.

You only really care about the revenue from a consumer if that revenue is less than the cost of providing them with their service, with heavy downloaders this isn't the case.

Originally Posted by Frank

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.

Sorry but that proves nothing other than their QoS is set up to prioritise HTTP downloads over torrents.

Lets say an ISP has 10mpbs of bandwidth available, that could be being used by say.... 5mbps p2p, 1mbps VOIP, 3mbps HTTP and 1mbps streaming video.

Now, the bandwidth is at 100% utilisation, what happens when you want to download something over http? Under a neutral system, you get crap speeds. With DPI and QoS, the p2p traffic gets reduced to 4.5mbps, and the HTTP traffic goes up to 3.5mbps to give you your 500kbps download.

It's not that the bandwidth was "always there", it's that the lower priority uses have been squeezed to give a higher priority usage more bandwidth. If you go back to the plus.net blogs I linked to there are some bandwith utilisation graphs that show this perfectly. The level of usage is constant throughout the day, however during the day the %age that p2p traffic uses on the network is squeezed as other uses increase.

No ISP wants idle capacity sitting there doing nothing.

[Frank]

Add to this denial Berkett's previous bo*****s statement. Seems this VM CEO has a big mouth.

Virgin Media CEO Neil Berkett has attacked the principle of net neutrality, whereby internet service providers do not interfere with or degrade the speed at which content is delivered from websites to consumers, branding it as "b****cks".

Berkett's cable operator ranks as the second largest internet service provider in the UK with approximately 3.6m customers.

In an interview with the Royal Television Society's Television magazine, Berkett said that "this net neutrality thing is a load of b****cks", and revealed that Virgin is already in talks with unnamed content providers about paying to have their content delivered faster than others.

http://www.digitalspy.co.uk/digitalt...eutrality.html

[TheDon]

Originally Posted by Chicken

Does anyone know whats happening/not happening? According to http://www.techwatch.co.uk/2008/12/1...-virgin-media/



Hmmm.. so now its blocking torrent sites eh?... the plot thickens.

Unsourced comment from a blog? I'd hold the same weight to that comment as I would to someone signing up to this forum and saying the world was going to end in the next week.

[Frank]

Originally Posted by TheDon

Sorry but that proves nothing other than their QoS is set up to prioritise HTTP downloads over torrents.
<snip crap>

Dude, you have NO IDEA what you are talking about. The ISP I am referring to have ALREADY ADMITTED to doing DPI shaping. I love how you are trying to tell me how my own connection is shaped.

QoS does not cause Torrent traffic to drop from full speed down to 40KBs at 6pm exactly, and then allow it to increase again at exactly 1am

Let me guess, the composition of the ISP traffic changes at exactly 6pm every day and X number of people start using http traffic so as to bring my torrent traffic to exactly 40KBs, and they continue use http traffic for a constant rate until 1am, whereupon they log off and go to bed.

[SimonB79]

Originally Posted by sk8er_boi6000

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

sticks n stones mate.... sticks n stones.... Im using my wii to reply ATM so i will keep it short.... but i take your using a business line 2 distribute your linux p2p offerings and not residential?

[Gary L]

Originally Posted by TheDon

No, they don't need their income because the income from them is offset by the costs they bring.

Not everyone on 20mb is a heavy user, most just like being able to download quickly when they need to, others just have it because it's part of their package.

When you're on about heavy users you're talking about less than the top 5%. These people could leave and make a dent in VM's revenue, but take a massive slice out of their transit costs.

You only really care about the revenue from a consumer if that revenue is less than the cost of providing them with their service, with heavy downloaders this isn't the case.

I understand you now. you're saying that the best thing for them to do is not have any customers at all. be they light users or heavy users.
the money they will save from costs they have to spend on customers. will keep them in business.

[sk8er_boi6000]

Originally Posted by SimonB79

sticks n stones mate.... sticks n stones.... Im using my wii to reply ATM so i will keep it short.... but i take your using a business line 2 distribute your linux p2p offerings and not residential?

I don't distribute any Linux distributions myself, but I made the point that others do. Technically anyone who seeds the torrent after completing the download is distributing it, so that would apply to business and residential users.

The point is, that throttling in the ISP system would harm everyone... downloaders, distributors, and yes pirates as well, as I could still be using my connection to download a Linux ISO. What line I use to seed a torrent makes no difference, if it is a legitimate use. I am not trying to, and cannot defend the illegal use of Bittorrent technology but so many people these days are ignorant to its other uses.

[TheDon]

Originally Posted by Frank

Dude, you have NO IDEA what you are talking about. The ISP I am referring to have ALREADY ADMITTED to doing DPI shaping. I love how you are trying to tell me how my own connection is shaped.

QoS does not cause Torrent traffic to drop from full speed down to 40KBs at 6pm exactly, and then allow it to increase again at exactly 1am.

I'm not denying they are using shaping, infact my post said that all it shows is their shaping prioritises HTTP over torrents, which says that they ARE using it.

Qos between those times does explain it perfectly, most ISPs don't use QoS 24/7, only at peak times, such as.... between 6pm and 1am!

And as for having no idea what I'm talking about, I worked on the QoS platform for an ISP for over 18months, I've sat there watching real time network utilisation graphs showing the changes in traffic patterns based on QoS, seen how traffic patterns change during the day as people get home from work and then go to bed, my entire job role for the last 9months was tuning and monitoring the QoS settings to make sure nothing was wrongly categorised, and to make sure our external transit links weren't getting raped by p2p. I think I know what I'm talking about, everytime I close my eyes I can still see the SNMP graphs.

What about you? What's your experience with QoS and DPI? Other than "ZOMG MY TORRENTS ARE TEH SLOW!"?

Once again, nothing from what you states shows there is any free bandwidth available on the network, only that HTTP takes priority over torrents. Now, there COULD be free bandwidth, it'd be a dumb as hell setup to just blanket limit any form of traffic whilst there's bandwidth available, but what you said doesn't PROVE there is.

[Frank]

Originally Posted by sk8er_boi6000

The point is, that throttling in the ISP system would harm everyone... downloaders, distributors, and yes pirates as well, as I could still be using my connection to download a Linux ISO.

Maybe VM will offer Linux ISOs on their prioritised content store for cheap, so you can get it much faster than through a torrent?

[TheDon]

Originally Posted by Gary L

I understand you now. you're saying that the best thing for them to do is not have any customers at all. be they light users or heavy users.
the money they will save from costs they have to spend on customers. will keep them in business.

No, the best thing for them is to have customers that are profitable, and not customers that aren't. It's not that hard of a concept to grasp.

Light users are, they can give light users a contention of 100:1 and they won't notice. "Normal" users as well (normal being average), can deal nicely with a contention of 50:1. Medium users can deal nicely with contentions of 20:1. These are all profitable.

Heavy users though, if you had an ISP full of just heavy users you'd have to give them a contention of around 2:1, 5:1 at best, and this IS NOT profitable.

Now if you have a small fraction of heavy users, it's not really an issue, sure they aren't profitable, but the profit you make from the other users outweighs this and subsidises them (this is the point Be, O2, Sky, etc are at now). But when the number of heavy users increases you're suddenly making less and less money, and there's a point where you start losing money in providing the service (this is where those ISPs are heading). The job of an ISP is to prevent it getting to this point, either by disconnecting heavy users (which is what happened all the time with ISP's using BT wholesale ADSL) or shaping to ensure that this point can't be reached. Disconnecting is bad press, so the thing of choice is to shape and try to squeeze the heavy users usage down and keep costs at workable levels.

[Joxer]

Originally Posted by Frank

Maybe VM will offer Linux ISOs on their prioritised content store for cheap, so you can get it much faster than through a torrent?

Already on mirrors.virginmedia.com, no Mandriva though

[Bonglet]

We already have traffic shaping though - so why more of a throttle with certain applications p2p at lauch then it could be newsgroups then ftps the http downloads - where will it end i.e it wont so go with it if thats the qos you want :P.

Its certainly not a service i want especially when there going to pimp and monetarise there customes and or data via some phorm u like or homebred pimping service.