Virgin Media UK Begins Throttling P2P Traffic

An anonymous reader writes "The ISP which advertises itself as 'The fastest in the UK' and offers speeds of up to 100mbps has said it needs to throttle file sharing traffic to prevent slowness in other areas such as online multiplayer gaming. Trialing of the new traffic management plans commenced on March 2 and will only apply to upstream traffic, therefore download speeds will be unaffected. The clampdown will apply on top of the existing traffic shaping Virgin Media has in place and will affect all packages, including the previously unmanaged 100mbps deal. This policy, which applies to all broadband packages, is restricted to P2P applications and Newsgroups (which are commonly used to distribute large amounts of data)."

"overselling" it

[Anonymous Coward]

more like fraud/misrepresentation/mis-selling and its wholesale in the sector. Any other item has to be 'as described' and 'fit for purpose'. ofcom let them all of with a slap on the wrist about it because it was 'prevalent' in the industry. As a watchdog with the teeth to do something about it thats unacceptable.

Re:Translation

[wjh31]

Virgin media have just finished rolling out 50Mbps download, just started rolling out 100Mbps. and are in the process of doubling their upload speeds, so I call bull on you.

Re:Translation

[Chocky2]

I think you may have been listening to BT's marketing department too much if you think the problems lie with Virgin not upgrading their network, being oversubscribed, or offering poor performance.

Last week's Ofcom report on broadband speeds [ofcom.org.uk]

Re:welp....

[grahamm]

You can encrypt the port numbers, but not the IP packet. We need a good encrypted transport protocol that encrypts everything except the IP header and maybe a session id (so each session can use its own keys). ISPs will know what computer each packet is going to, but not the content, port number, sequence number, etc.

Such a protocol already exists. It is called IPSec using ESP in transport mode.

Re:welp....

[TheRaven64]

It depends on what they are doing. If they're putting peer to peer traffic in a high-bandwidth queue, and other stuff in a low latency channel, then I don't think anyone will mind. For VoIP traffic, you need about 5MB/hour, but ideally you want guarantees of latency under 100ms and jitter under 20ms. For BitTorrent or a large HTTP download, you want as much throughput as you can get, but a 2 second latency with a 3 second jitter is fine (as long as the TCP window settings are sensible). It doesn't sound like that's what they're doing though - they're just putting peer to peer traffic at a lower priority than everything else.