Should Virgin Media Throttle p2p traffic?

[craigj2k12]

Originally Posted by Sirius

I work for VM and i have been asked to do some testing

superhubs dont need testing according to most VM staff the work perfectly

[Sirius]

Originally Posted by craigj2k11

superhubs dont need testing according to most VM staff the work perfectly

The testing i am doing has nothing to do with the issues some have reported . Thats all i am saying on the matter.

[Jayster]

Originally Posted by _wtf_

I would guess that the real people who are affecting the network know how to pretty much circumvent any traffic shaping. VPN's not only hide their IP address but should also scupper the ISP's traffic management systems, that is, if they really are not inspecting peoples VPN packets, which I personally think they are doing.

That is where I think you are wrong, A lot of people student age (Secondary school and University) torrent yet know little about it not to mention anything else.

[Chrysalis]

andy you not quite right.

hard caps would work fine alongside iplayer et all unless either the caps are very low or the user is someone who uses iplayer quite heavily eg. 10 hours a day every day. However in the latter case I dont see that as a reason to not go ahead with hard caps, it is by far the most sensible solution but it conflicts with marketing.

'any' form of protocol shaping is pretty much doomed to fail, its 2 main problems are (a) it has too little % of users to work on and as a result those who do get throttled can get throttled excessively, if an isp has to throttle people down to dialup speeds to manage their capacity then that is going too far, and (b) false positives, even plusnet who have been doing this for years have regular issues with unidentified traffic.

Also p2p/nntp users will not forever suck up upgraded capacity, if the capacity is upgraded in drip feeds, ie. an extra 10% here and there then it could well seem that way because at the point they decide to upgrade they may be massively under capacity in the first place,if proper upgrading is done eg. a 10 fold increase (would be incredibly over subscribed if one not enough) then things would be ok. Of course VM operate in a manner they can/cant wont do large upgrades, a large upgrade for VM is doubling of bandwidth ie. node split or docsis2 port upgrade. In any case if an upgrade is immediatly saturated all it shows is that the oversubscription level is severe. I guess not too surprising when considering VM wait till ports are saturated before even starting to plan an upgrade never mind start the work. Even when saturated they still may not do anything and the CEO office or tier2 support need pushing to get things moving. In that situation if eg. it takes 6 months to do the upgrade then there is 6 months of growth going on whilst this is happening and the upgrade will likely only get them back to where they were 6 months ago if enough growth and of course means VM are constantly then playing catchup with capacity. This method of capacity management is doomed to fail even without p2p users.

p2p may be majorily copyright content (ignition its copyright infringement not theft), however isp's are not the police they should not be picking and choosing what types of traffic to crippled, I can understand to an extenct crippling the heaviest users by usage of 'any' protocol but not picking on specific protocols only.

Like I said in another post I am curious why protocol shaping is so popular in this country, our government is certianly one of the most anti copyright in the world as we have the most agressive laws in regards to copyright, I cant get out of my head copyright is a factor in why isp's have come to employ protocol shaping. Entanet's old now unused capacity management is by far the best I have seen in this country for those who dont know it worked like this.

Entanet had numerous BT central pipes (their chokepoint's) for their customers to use, at specific times of the day like in the evenings at 10pm when unlimited usage started then there was high demand causing all the pipes to hit 100% utilisation. They had a system called ALT (anti loss tool), you can maybe guess from the name its primary purpose was to prevent packet loss so basically maintain QOS. The pipes had different status colours, green, amber, red and black. Green is when utilisation below a certian threshold which I think was something like 95% utilisation. (because those pipes 655mbit much bigger than a UBR port they could tolerate higher % of usage before service detriment), then amber up to maybe 98% red up to 100% and black over 100%, apparently was possible to to slightly go over 655mbit on the pipes due to them been physically gigabit links but artifically throttled by BT. When green nothing was throttled, amber would be no change, if red then max possible speed for every single customer would be dropped by 0.5mbit. Same on black. So they were polled at intervals as I cannot remember how often lets say every 5 minutes. If the status still red or black then go down a further 0.5mbit, its possible if black it was more agressive as I cannot remember fully, this would keep going reduction of speeds until either hit the min threshold set by entanet which was 2mbit, so noone be throttled below 2mbit, or the status turned to amber or green. when amber I cannot remember it either kept it where it is or increased by 0.5mbit, green it increased by 0.5mbit every poll until full speed again or change to red. So basically it was constantly monitoring and adjusting end user throttled speeds to manage spare capacity. Now in my view entanet were over subscribed, this system kicked in on average 2 to 3 hours a day every weekday evening and nearly always went down to the bottom 2mbit but not on every single pipe, some were often barely affected due to inbalance of user spread across the pipes. On the weekends is where I seen the issue in that the system kicked in both every saturday and sunday just about the entire day from the morning all the way until midnight or so. That to me was excessive and led me to leave entanet however the actual throttling system did its job very well, things like packet loss and jitter rarely happened, when I used ssh was fine, streaming was fine so they kept mainstream activities and latency sensitive stuff working. p2p ultimately was affected by the system but only down to 2mbit not something silly like 5kB/sec. They even had customers excempt, all entanet resellers who paid for their own usage were excempt from ALT. So like plusnet if willing to pay extra it could be bypassed, the option was there. Entanet still run ALT on BT's new 21CN system but its not so effective now I think, the guy who designed it left the company. ALT in general is way less complex than protocol shaping, the only things that need configuring are the thresholds and cap levels. It would use sigificantly less processing power, doesnt need to inspect packets, is no false positives as it doesnt discriminate, is dynamic based on utilisation of port used on so if not needed wont even kick in. Of course its not so attractive to isp's like VM as people would get slower speedtest results and as a result there would be more complaints. Even tho overall the service would be better quality, which then leads me to say a ALT type system that prioritises on heaviest users first is probably the ideal solution which is apparently what comcast use.

[Ignitionnet]

Entanet switched to protocol based shaping in late 2009. Evidently people who used their connections for a bit of iPlayer and You Tube here and there took exception to being throttled to 2Mbps due to the P2P and newsgroup kiddies caning the bandwidth.

ISPs can pick and choose the traffic they 'cripple' - the law says they can inspect packets for network management purposes. This activity is quite specifically permitted within RIPA.

The offence doesn't actually have a clear name, it's popularly called copyright theft unless one is actually engaging in it in which case it's called 'Making the most of my Internet connection.'

Copyright is perfectly transparently a factor in why ISPs protocol shape. P2P / NNTP are obvious and easy targets to shape, it's rare that the shaped content is actually legitimate and most of the time when it is it's someone trying to offload the cost of distributing their product onto ISPs.

If you're thinking that enforcement of copyright is why protocol shaping is employed that's not the case.

As far as protocol agnostic throttling goes there are cases for both. One case for the shaping is that it seems unfair for those who are engaging in streaming legitimate and paid for media to be throttled so that those who are using non-interactive applications can avoid being controlled. One case against it is that it's all network load so should be treated equally.

We've discussed capacity management in some depth previously. As noted with your ideas customers would be very happy until their ISP went under and you've a cynical approach from the company point of view due to previous experience which may or may not be typical. It's certainly getting quite old now if nothing else.

[carlwaring]

Originally Posted by Sirius

Considering how some on here act with members of staff i feel it best making sure they are aware of that fact.

You think facts will stop 'em?

[Ignitionnet]

It should of course be noted, in the name of balance, that some of the staff who post on the forum have also become increasingly provocative in their own right.

[Chrysalis]

I never said copyright is the only reason but I suspect its a factor. It wouldnt surprise me if someone whether it be the government or media companies have leaned on the major isp's and this has led to protocol throttling been favoured over other methods. If there was no protocol shaping then obviously something would be there in its place whether it be different types of throttling or usage limits. However to say protocol shaping is not expensive in mantime and not problematic is wrong so it is clearly not the best technical option to use yet it is popular here. Whilst some isp's in other countries may have deployed protocol shaping the extenct its been used is nowhere near the level its used here and some countries regulators have even gave it the thumbs down.

A few didnt like the 2mbit throttle on entanet is true but they were a small minority and didnt realise the alternative of allowing things to naturally congest would have been far worse, although iplayer was never a reason I heard and that doesnt require 2mbit so I cant think as to why that would be mentioned, when they switched was after they moved to WBC 21CN, that system didnt work so well with ALT plus at that time the guy who designed ALT had left the company. They initially tried to stick with just ALT and the protocol shaping came later. the most common complaint I heard related to ALT was more that people with high sync speeds felt they were been unfairly treated as the ALT capping system effectively left people with low sync speeds less affected, if you had a sync speed of 2mbit or below you were effectively never throttled. That really wouldnt apply to VM since everyone syncs at equal speeds although there is differing packages.

The point been that at 2mbit just about everything will still work. Now we have HD streaming which may possibly be affected but I would expect a modern day version of ALT to have a higher base limit than 2mbit anyway as that ALT was years ago.

[craigj2k12]

Originally Posted by Chrysalis

I never said copyright is the only reason but I suspect its a factor. It wouldnt surprise me if someone whether it be the government or media companies have leaned on the major isp's and this has led to protocol throttling been favoured over other methods. If there was no protocol shaping then obviously something would be there in its place whether it be different types of throttling or usage limits. However to say protocol shaping is not expensive in mantime and not problematic is wrong so it is clearly not the best technical option to use yet it is popular here. Whilst some isp's in other countries may have deployed protocol shaping the extenct its been used is nowhere near the level its used here and some countries regulators have even gave it the thumbs down.

ofcom are happy with 512kb broadband

[Chrysalis]

Originally Posted by craigj2k11

ofcom are happy with 512kb broadband

whats that to do with copyright?

any leaning wouldnt have been done via ofcom anyway, more likely the minister responsible for it.

technically if something is been throttled to below whatever the defined speed for boadband is, then its not a broadband product so if 'any' protocol is throttled to dialup speeds then the product itself is not technically broadband. Unfortenatly its yet another thing thats never made it to court to be tested.

[Ignitionnet]

Originally Posted by Chrysalis

Whilst some isp's in other countries may have deployed protocol shaping the extenct its been used is nowhere near the level its used here and some countries regulators have even gave it the thumbs down.

You are having a laugh right?

Incomplete list, obviously, but...

http://wiki.vuze.com/w/Bad_ISPs

[_wtf_]

I wonder if/how long before some bright spark figures out a way of disguising/using the http protocol for all things p2p are currently being hammered for!

I also don't understand why bandwidth is apparently more expensive than rocking horse pooh.

Try buying business bandwidth if you think consumer is expensive....

[Sirius]

Originally Posted by Ignitionnet

It should of course be noted, in the name of balance, that some of the staff who post on the forum have also become increasingly provocative in their own right.

Hope your not aiming that at me Sir

[_wtf_]

Originally Posted by Hugh

Try buying business bandwidth if you think consumer is expensive....

So you don't know either then.