Virgin Media to dump neutrality and target BitTorrent users

[zer0]

yeah great idea make traffic management even more confusing
now it will just be a cat and mouse game between applications that are throttled and those that arnt

[Toto]

Originally Posted by Mick

Ahem...

http://www.cableforum.co.uk/board/34697947-post76.html

Sorry Mick

[TheDon]

Originally Posted by Frank

Well that would be my choice too, I would also like a connection where VoIP and browsing works fine, but where I can also use whatever application I want on the service that I am paying for. Why offer an "up to 50Mbps" service if you can't use it?

You can.

You just have to be aware that some applications may have a lower priority, and at times of congestion they'll work slower. It's a small price to pay for ensuring that when you need low latency you can get it.

Originally Posted by Frank

Well yes you are correct of course, but you run into problems, for example, when an ISP decides that ABC Video store is high priority because that store pays them money, and XYZ video store is low priority because that store does not pay them money. What if I want to download from XYZ video store and not ABC video store because XYZ is much cheaper, yet XYZ is unusable and I am forced to use ABC? Why should I use something that is indirectly being dictated to me by an ISP (through available speed) on a connection that I already pay to use.

Ah the big myth of net neutrality. That ISPs will be paid to speed up certain sites, artificually slowing others. Any ISP that did that would see a mass exodus of customers, so they most likely wouldn't. Even if they hypothetically did, would it be such a huge problem? The money they recieve would be subsidising the cost of the ISP providing their service, keeping costs down for the consumer, and the effect on the speed of any other sites will most likely be negligable.

When you start talking about situations like this you're talking about bringing in legislation to prevent something there's NO EVIDENCE will happen, and in doing so compromising an ISPs ability to provide a connection that is suitable for low latency applications. I'm not a fan of legislating "just in case" especially when the "just in case" is a "not very likely". If it gets to the stage that ISPs are bringing in traffic shaping that effects the everyday use of the net unless the sites you use pay them big money then that's the time that ofcom can step in and consumers can vote with their wallets. Until then they need to leave things the hell alone because a network where all bits are treated equally ignores the fundamental fact that not all bits are equal, and some are a hell of a lot more important than others.

Originally Posted by Frank

Well then don't offer such a high speed yet crippled service, or upgrade the network. It is so ironic that VM launches a 50Mbps service but at the same time makes an off-the-cuff remark about DPI on BitTorrent.

The issue isn't really with the downstream, downstream traffic (especially with services like 20 and 50mb) is mostly burst traffic. You just can't really download enough to sustain a 50mb/s transfer for significant periods, when you an download things quicker than you can use/watch them (a 2hr HD movie in 15mins for example) then there's going to be a huge amount of idle time on your connection, but you want that speed there when you do need it.

The real issue is with the upstream (which ofc directly effects the downstream traffic as well when your ACK's go missing.) and it doesn't matter how fast they make the upstream because applications like bittorrent will ALWAYS make use of it. This is where you have to draw a line and bring in something like DPI, you need to ensure you have upstream bandwidth to provide a smooth service, and you just can't do that in a neutral network, and you can't just keep increasing it until it's not congested because as p2p becomes more and more widespread you'll be fighting a losing battle.

[O.G]

Originally Posted by TheDon

No, you're a business who has a thing called a bottom line to worry about.

The cost of providing the maximum advertised speed to the majority of your subscribers is FAR higher than the income you're getting from them.

So you have two choices as a consumer:

1) Go get a leased line (or have your ISP raise prices to much closer to leased line levels)
2) Deal with contention.

In the real reality, of one where things cost money and consumers get what they pay for, it's as simple as that.

On the contrary, they do not get what they pay for, therein lies the problem.

[Frank]

Originally Posted by TheDon

Ah the big myth of net neutrality. That ISPs will be paid to speed up certain sites, artificually slowing others. Any ISP that did that would see a mass exodus of customers, so they most likely wouldn't.

There is no myth. You can be sure that the "legal, licensed peer-to-peer music service" (referred to here) will not be subject to same throttling as other peer-to-peer services. There is also no hypothetical about it. ISPs where I live throttle BitTorrent traffic right now, to a crawl, while there is plenty of bandwith available. It is not a case of throttling it just while necessary as you claimed in your previous post, but rather throttling it all the time.

Originally Posted by TheDon

Even if they hypothetically did, would it be such a huge problem? The money they recieve would be subsidising the cost of the ISP providing their service, keeping costs down for the consumer, and the effect on the speed of any other sites will most likely be negligable.

And you know they will pass on these cost savings to the consumer how exactly? I'm guessing "pass throttling savings on to consumers" is not in VM's current business plan.

You know the effect on other sites would be negligible in a hypothetical situation how? It is ridiculous to claim that the effects of DPI are neglibible when you don't have a DPI throttled connection. Nor is Virgin Media an ISP utopia.

Originally Posted by TheDon

When you start talking about situations like this you're talking about bringing in legislation to prevent something there's NO EVIDENCE will happen

Really? http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post...ou-pay-up.html

Or maybe you would prefer to buy free BBC content, and other freely available content from VM's new "legal, peer-to-peer service"? The rest of us would prefer to use the connection we paid for to get it.

It's a slippery slope, not the "not very likely" you refer to.

Originally Posted by TheDon

The real issue is with the upstream (which ofc directly effects the downstream traffic as well when your ACK's go missing.) and it doesn't matter how fast they make the upstream because applications like bittorrent will ALWAYS make use of it. This is where you have to draw a line and bring in something like DPI, you need to ensure you have upstream bandwidth to provide a smooth service, and you just can't do that in a neutral network, and you can't just keep increasing it until it's not congested because as p2p becomes more and more widespread you'll be fighting a losing battle.

Good points

[TheDon]

Originally Posted by Frank

There is no myth. You can be sure that the "legal, licensed peer-to-peer music service" (referred to here) will not be subject to same throttling as other peer-to-peer services. There is also no hypothetical about it. ISPs where I live throttle BitTorrent traffic right now, to a crawl, while there is plenty of bandwith available. It is not a case of throttling it just while necessary as you claimed in your previous post, but rather throttling it all the time.

There is a myth. Most of the net neutrality "debate" involves people going around preaching about a multi-tired internet where you have to pay for access to different websites, which is a load of rubbish.

I can be sure it'll be a lower priority than something like VOIP because latency dependant traffic will be assigned a higher priority than normal traffic, and any p2p service, no matter how legal, wont be. It may be higher priority than torrents, but it'd never be the same level as something like VOIP.

Originally Posted by Frank

And you know they will pass on these cost savings to the consumer how exactly? I'm guessing "pass throttling savings on to consumers" is not in VM's current business plan.

Nope, they wont, but they will use them to increase capacity as that is the entire point of getting the content providers to pay.

Originally Posted by Frank

You know the effect on other sites would be negligible in a hypothetical situation how? It is ridiculous to claim that the effects of DPI are neglibible when you don't have a DPI throttled connection. Nor is Virgin Media an ISP utopia.


Really? http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post...ou-pay-up.html

Or maybe you would prefer to buy free BBC content, and other freely available content from VM's new "legal, peer-to-peer service"? The rest of us would prefer to use the connection we paid for to get it.

It's a slippery slope, not the "not very likely" you refer to.

I used to work for a small ISP that had extensive QoS, our BT central pipe was constantly at full capacity, and any time http traffic dropped bittorrent traffic would immediately pick up the slack and take it back up to capacity.

The effect of us prioritising VOIP over HTTP was very marginal (as it was prioritising anything over default traffic) there was next to no noticable difference in browsing speed (as there just isn't that much VOIP traffic). Making bittorrent lower priority however made a MASSIVE difference because there is that much of it. This is how I know it'd be negligable, because the volume of traffic from a "priority" service is likely to be negligable against the overall bandwidth, whereas bittorrent takes out a massive proportion.

The iplayer thing is also fine IMO, it's a high bandwidth application, and should have a lower priority than normal browsing and latency dependant applications. The "we'll slow it down unless you pay" isn't like they're holding them to randsom, it's saying that they'll make it lower priority traffic unless the bbc are willing to foot the bill to increase capacity to compensate for the increase in usage (simply because it's not cost effective for the ISP to, because consumers wont pay more for it). It's not like they'd be blocking it, just making sure it doesn't adversely effect other applications.

The slippery slope is legislation for the sake of legislation when there isn't a problem to start with. We live in a free market, where companies are free to commit commercial suicide if they want to, and consumers are free to not use their products if they don't like them.

Forcing legislation that is damaging is not the answer. Reactive actions that deal with any issues will always be better than blanket legislation that takes a vital tool out of an ISPs toolbox. I really would not want to have a product from an ISP that was not allowed to implement any form of QoS.

---------- Post added at 19:26 ---------- Previous post was at 19:20 ----------

Originally Posted by O.G

On the contrary, they do not get what they pay for, therein lies the problem.

Yes they do.

They pay for a CONTENDED service, as such they pay A LOT less than what you pay for the gaurenteed level of bandwidth that a leased line provides.

The problem lies with people having unreasonable expectations of what their money should get them.

If I go to an all you an eat buffet then sure, I COULD eat everything, if I did I'd get a bargain, but I'm not going to. The restaurant knows this, so they offer a contended service that costs a lot less than if they were cooking it all just for me.

[Hom3r]

ISPs can easily find out who is accessing dodgy torrent sites, so be afraid.

leagal torrents you will be OK.

[Gary L]

Originally Posted by TheDon

Yes they do.

They pay for a CONTENDED service, as such they pay A LOT less than what you pay for the gaurenteed level of bandwidth that a leased line provides.

So because there is such a thing as a priority broadband service called a leased line, we have to make the obvious differences between the two and are not to have any expectations of the Virgin one?

The problem lies with people having unreasonable expectations of what their money should get them.

They would be the expectations that were given as the reason as to why you should sign up with Virgin.

If I go to an all you an eat buffet then sure, I COULD eat everything, if I did I'd get a bargain, but I'm not going to. The restaurant knows this, so they offer a contended service that costs a lot less than if they were cooking it all just for me.

You are wrong. and it's a pretty bad analogy.
You think it works for you because you said I'm not going to try changing it to I am going to try to and see how your argument turns out.

[ntl.wotcha]

What about Wow patches which are P2P distributed ? A 4GB patch would take ages and we all know how daft Wow is huge patches.

[Impz2002]

Originally Posted by Frank

This practise has already been ruled illegal in the U.S., and Comcast was fined for DPI on BitTorrent packets. Deep packet inspection is also a violation of any type of net neutrlity idea, and represents all kinds of problems.

Comcast were actually preventing people from seeding torrents. they were doing this but inserting RST packets in the data stream to the person seeding the torrent. This caused the connection to be reset therefore making seeding impossible. I think that is why they got in so much trouble as slowing down traffic is one thing but actually modifying the traffic without user consent is another!

Impz

[Elsie]

Releasing 50mb broadband and within 24 hours saying they're going to kill torrent traffic is akin to Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera inviting me to their pool party ... the day after it happens.

[Impz2002]

Originally Posted by TheDon

Yes they do.

They pay for a CONTENDED service, as such they pay A LOT less than what you pay for the gaurenteed level of bandwidth that a leased line provides.

The problem lies with people having unreasonable expectations of what their money should get them.

Bravo ! well said.

I challenge anyone here to find a residential ISP that doesn't have a contended service. Can you imagine if VM's network was setup so all customers could fully saturate their connection whenever they wanted to ? can you imagine the amount of redundant bandwith that would just sit there not being used?

And then there is the financial side of this, VM would not last 5 mins as it would cost them so much to have a network like that.

Impz

---------- Post added at 20:04 ---------- Previous post was at 20:03 ----------

Originally Posted by Elsie

Releasing 50mb broadband and within 24 hours saying they're going to kill torrent traffic is akin to Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera inviting me to their pool party ... the day after it happens.

They are not going to stop bittorrent traffic they are going to shape it at peak times !

I dont see why that is unreasonable, Networks need to be managed its all about striking a balance !

[TheDon]

Originally Posted by Gary L

So because there is such a thing as a priority broadband service called a leased line, we have to make the obvious differences between the two and are not to have any expectations of the Virgin one?

Yes.

One is a residential connection aimed at residential users, the other is to offer gaurenteed bandwidth and aimed at businesses, and expectations should be in line with that.

That is to say that whilst it's a 50mb connection that is capable of reaching 50mb, there's nothing that says it can gaurentee this, and no SLAs, and even the simplist of thinkers can work out that if everyone was maxing their connections then you'd get no where near 50mb because it's not a sustainable level of bandwidth at the price point.

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

Originally Posted by Gary L

They would be the expectations that were given as the reason as to why you should sign up with Virgin.

Yes, those reasons are it's more reliable and faster than ADSL. No where when you sign up does it state you are gaurenteed any level of service.

Originally Posted by Gary L

You are wrong. and it's a pretty bad analogy.
You think it works for you because you said I'm not going to try changing it to I am going to try to and see how your argument turns out.

You can try, and you'll get asked to leave the restaurant. Just like when you try to use more than your share of bandwidth on VM you'll get STM'd.

All you can eat services work because the average person will eat an amount of food worth less than they pay, leaving the restaurant to make some profit. The same with residential broadband, the average person will use less bandwidth than they pay for, so it's a viable service. When someone comes along and starts using the service constantly it shifts the balance of the average person to a level where it's not a viable service, then controls have to be put in place to ensure everyone else gets their fair share as well.

If you are a heavy downloader you will NOT find an ISP that is happy to have you. Many will tolerate you, but only until their average user suddenly becomes unprofitable, and then they'll start taking measures to ensure that their service an run profitably. If that's something you don't like, then you'll have to go for a service with dedicated guarenteed bandwidth, and you'll pay A LOT more for it.

[jokasmoker]

Originally Posted by Impz2002

They are not going to stop bittorrent traffic they are going to shape it at peak times !

I dont see why that is unreasonable, Networks need to be managed its all about striking a balance !

if they shape bit torrent traffic along the same lines as they do traffic management atm i think its not all that bad just dont download via peak times download over night.

also what about the amount of traffic sites like youtube and others generate http://torrentfreak.com/http-traffic...sy-of-youtube/
thats surely more than what p2p traffic is seems like bit torrent is being made the scapegoat.

[TheDon]

Originally Posted by jokasmoker

if they shape bit torrent traffic along the same lines as they do traffic management atm i think its not all that bad just dont download via peak times download over night.

also what about the amount of traffic sites like youtube and others generate
thats surely more than what p2p traffic is seems like bit torrent is being made the scapegoat.

youtube isn't too bad, iplayer saw massive rises in bandwidth used for streaming (around a 100% increase) though. The reason http has overtook p2p again is because of traffic shaping, without it bittorrent would destroy everything else.

There's a couple of great posts that deal with this on plusnet's blog, one of them deals with the cost of providing bandwidth which obviously isn't entirely relevant to VM as it's for ADSL and so deals with the cost of bandwidth on BT centrals, with the exception of the section on transit costs, which reveal their external transit costs average out to £20 a month per Mb/s. (Incidently, look at the p2p usage on the overnight graph on that blog, keep it in mind)

The other is specifically about iplayer and it's effects on bandwidth usage. Now, remember the p2p usage on that graph on the other blog? Check it out on the ones for the evening on this one. It's gone from around 55%, down to 10-20%. This is because of their traffic shaping. Without it p2p would be using whatever it can get it's hands on. It really is a beast that HAS to be tamed if people want a service that is at all reliable.