Virgin Media UK to Clamp Down on Peak Time Upstream Broadband P2P Traffic

[DaBees-Knees]

http://www.ispreview.co.uk/story/2011/03/03/virgin-media-uk-to-clamp-down-on-peak-time-upstream-broadband-p2p-traffic.html

Cable giant Virgin Media UK is preparing to impose a new broadband ISP Traffic Management regime upon P2P (File Sharing) and Newsgroup upstream traffic between the Peak Time (5PM to Midnight) hours. It's hoped that the move will improve the performance of other non-P2P services, such as multiplayer gaming (latency), which has apparently suffered due to heavy P2P uploading activity.

Virgin Media Status Update (2nd March 2011)

After the successful out of hours trial of our combined upstream and downstream file sharing traffic management policy we will be trialling this new policy between 17:00 and 00:00 for one week starting on Wednesday 2nd of March.

Between these times P2P and Newsgroup upstream traffic will be managed in a similar way to our current downstream traffic management. If the trial is successful we'll launch the new policy immediately.

We're interested if you could tell us how this affects your gaming experience over the next few days and if you see any general improvement in latency and ping at peak times.

Virgin's existing peak-time policy for upstream traffic management runs from 3PM - 8PM (except on the old 2Mbps legacy service where it runs from 9AM - 9PM). It's worth pointing out that many multiplayer games, such as XBox Live titles, World of Warcraft and others (Steam etc.), are ironically reliant upon P2P performance. However Virgin should be able to make exceptions for these.

It seems it's easier to blame p2p for all your ills rather than cure them. The UK's industry watchdog Ofcom is currently looking in to users not getting what they pay for. It will be interesting to see if this includes p2p users.  

Addendum: In the same week that Virgin Media announced the extended throttling of p2p users they also announced price increases. Cynical or what?

[GhostShip]

This seems simply deisgned to force internet users to become content consumers and is a cynical and underhand abuse by virgin of their network, I think when a company decides what applications you can and cannot use on a paid for connection they have overstepped the bounds of their agreement with the customer, the law says clearly that virgin should not even be looking at the packets let alone using then to pick and choose who can use the internet or not, I hope a test case is brough to ensure the rule of law is upheld.

[bigmike]

As a winmx user i've noticed that speeds slow dramatically when capped this week. From 130k up to 10k up.
But this only seems to be to non virgin customers. I can still upload at 100k to other virgin customers

[White Stripes]

bandwidth is cheap within an isps own network -- its the interconnects that cost

[Mñß*¿ §háµñßhöÿ]

Virginmedia uses servers installed by NTL media and on purchase of the NTL company brand name virgin agreed their would be no job losses within 6 months of VM taking over 3 call centers in Scotland were closed cutting over 1500 jobs so it doesn't surprise me nor should anyone else be surprised by the capping scheme and more to the fact. DO NOT be surprised if virgin make it a pay as you surf scheme in the near future

This has been brought to you by a disgruntled former NTL worker!