New Acceptable Usage Policy from VM (discussion)

[Dush]

http://community.virginmedia.com/t5/...cy/td-p/849239

VM are updating their acceptable usage policy. Thought you guys should know so you can have input. They're removing the detrimental usage policy now which is a big step forward for me:

Q10. I’ve received letters & emails from Virgin Media about detrimental use in the past asking me to move my heavy use outside of the 9am to 9pm peak time window. I’ve noticed there’s no mention of detrimental use in the new AUP, why’s that?

A10. As we mentioned in our answer to question 2, the Internet is a constantly evolving environment. The way that our customers use our network is also constantly evolving. As we continually assess how our network is being utilised we have decided to halt our Detrimental Use policy. It should be noted however that Subscriber Traffic Management (STM) is still in place to help protect our network from abuse through extremely high usage, and you can read up on that here:

[jb66]

I find it hard virgin are just going to remove that policy.

Maybe they'll bring out a hard cap, say go over 1TB a month then 50% throttle until next month? Cant see virgin allowing folk download 5-6TB a month for the same price. Maybe they customers wont be offered a retention deal?

[Alan Fry]

They better not launch a download cap!

[kwikbreaks]

Originally Posted by jb66

I find it hard virgin are just going to remove that policy.

Me too. They'll need more aggressive shaping or there will be more areas suffering high congestion.

[Dush]

STM is still in place so you can't really hammer the service constantly. If shaping works properly it should basically result in high bandwidth utilisation for VM's core/edge but end users not getting effected for time critical applications or regular use.

BT Infinity doesn't have any caps but they do shape aggressively at prime time.

As I high user (average 500gb, sometimes as much as 800gb) I don't have any issues with that.

[kwikbreaks]

There's no STM on 50Mbps and over. The shaping can be circumvented. Judging by what I saw happen to my own area it only takes a single heavy user to make a significant impact if the base load is already borderline or close to that. I could see very sudden changes in the TBB monitor that I can't see was co-ordinated action by multiple users and those changes coincided with periods of beyond dire performance. A single 100Mbps customer uploading flat out will consume over 50% of the local pipe until they hit the 6GB STM.

If the threatening letters are being scrapped then I suspect that what replaces them to keep the network humming without it impacting VMs bottom line will probably be less acceptable to heavy downloaders than the letters were.

[MovedGoalPosts]

I suspect VM don't have a choice but to remove the detrimental use policy if they still want to be able to twist words and claim "unlimited" use. http://www.cableforum.co.uk/article/...ted-use-claims

[Dush]

Originally Posted by kwikbreaks

If the threatening letters are being scrapped then I suspect that what replaces them to keep the network humming without it impacting VMs bottom line will probably be less acceptable to heavy downloaders than the letters were.

That could be, but they have published a draft proposal which has nothing of the sort. I'm also wondering how they're going to manage this and I do think it's a marketing strategy.

I think a prime time period between 16:00-00:00 like Sky do is fine.

[kwikbreaks]

There will be a new traffic management regime to go with the new AUP for sure. There never was anything in the AUP that mentioned shaping, STM etc. and that is what will be used instead of the letters.

[keepitretro]

Well bt infinity gets here in march 2012. And i have just signed up for 100mb, if they start making big changes to the current system, do you have grounds to cancel your contract as it is in effect a reduction in service???

The (Talk) at the moment says there is (Personal usage allowance) in the pipeline, if that were the case surely you could cancel as that would be a reduction in the service you receive!

[Milambar]

I don't know if it was present in the old AUP but section 6.5.1 could be abused to legally disconnect anyone they choose.

6.5.1 You may not use your email to send unsolicited messages.

My reasoning for this, is, as written, the simple act of me sending an email to a friend asking if they are OK, is technically an unsolicited email as they didn't ask me to send it, and therefore in breach of the written AUP. This section should really be rethought.

I know what the intent is, but we all know that clever people can twist badly written rules like that to enforce the literal rule and not the spirit of the rule.

[BenMcr]

Originally Posted by Milambar

I don't know if it was present in the old AUP but section 6.5.1 could be abused to legally disconnect anyone they choose.

Yes it is:

9.2.1. you may not use your email to send unsolicited messages to groups of people

[Milambar]

Ah, but the wording is slightly different, "groups of people". It puts a slightly different, and more acceptable spin on the rule. As written in the new AUP, just sending a friendly but unexpected email to a single friend is breaking the AUP.

[Chrysalis]

Originally Posted by Alan Fry

They better not launch a download cap!

why, you download 24/7?

that would be the most sensible thing VM have ever done in recent times. However its also extremely unlikely as marketing leads that company.

This move is simply to comply with a recent ASA ruling.

I do expect STM to either change or be removed also as the same ruling forbids throttling that is more than moderate, STM kills 75% of speed so is more than moderate. Also worth mentioning the top 2 tiers have no STM at all for downloads as well as protocol throttling which can be evaded. The upload STM is very weak in comparison to the download STM and isnt present on the top tier.

[7031]

I wouldn't be a fan of a usage cap, but having said that, it's better than a detrimental usage policy, as at least then people would have an idea of how much bandwidth they have available.

Whether or not I would stick with VM though would really be down to what kind of caps we're looking at. 1TB or so would be nice, 3TB would be awesome (can't imagine myself using that much, but still, it's always nice to have additional bandwidth available).

I am a heavy user though - people will probably ask how on earth I could possibly use as much bandwidth as I do, but according to my router, I use around 400GB per month download, 129GB upload. Recently my usage has been very high but I don't expect this to continue (server harddrive backups to local server) as I'll be sorting out something dedicated with SoftLayer soon (got 1 server there, thinking of adding a backup server either with them or with another cheaper company, as well, performance isn't so important for a backup server).

In regards to STM, I'd prefer that they used a system where it was more QoS priority based. Rather than having hard caps, just set it so torrenters / people downloading large files etc have lower priority than people who are receiving streaming content. If I'm downloading a large file, or having something backed up onto my home connection anyway, I'm not going to mind if it takes a bit longer. Speed is more important for smaller files and streaming content as far as users are concerned than larger files bigger than 1-3GB or so (think movies).