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)."

welp....

[CSFFlame]

And this is why all traffic should be obfuscated, if not encrypted. The ISPs have no business knowing what the content of the packets going across their wires are.

Re:welp....

[Anonymous Coward]

tcptraceroute hotfile.com (usual port 80)

XX manc-bb-1b-ae0-0.network.virginmedia.net (62.253.187.178) 15.334 ms 13.543 ms 17.212 ms
XX know-core-1b-pc200.network.virginmedia.net (195.182.178.150) 14.972 ms 14.482 ms 15.388 ms
XX wb7301a.network.virginmedia.net (62.30.0.204) 16.185 ms 14.264 ms 16.043 ms
XX h3.hotfile.com (74.120.10.111) [open] 16.225 ms 15.056 ms 15.300 ms

traceroute hotfile.com

XX manc-bb-1b-ae0-0.network.virginmedia.net (62.253.187.178) 14.269 ms 39.439 ms 14.050 ms
XX know-core-1b-pc200.network.virginmedia.net (195.182.178.150) 17.034 ms 16.912 ms 17.596 ms
XX wb7301a.network.virginmedia.net (62.30.0.204) 14.581 ms 16.816 ms 17.377 ms
XX brhm-bb-1a-ge-720-0.network.virginmedia.net (62.30.249.46) 18.815 ms 21.178 ms 19.656 ms
XX 168.ge-1-3-3.mpr1.lhr2.uk.above.net (213.161.65.149) 30.848 ms 31.543 ms 30.107 ms
XX above-ntt-2.lhr2.uk.above.net (64.125.12.134) 33.592 ms 29.077 ms 33.319 ms
XX ae-2.r22.londen03.uk.bb.gin.ntt.net (129.250.2.77) 24.697 ms 25.470 ms 25.507 ms
XX as-0.r22.nycmny01.us.bb.gin.ntt.net (129.250.3.254) 119.334 ms 123.381 ms 107.119 ms
XX ae-0.r23.nycmny01.us.bb.gin.ntt.net (129.250.3.73) 127.396 ms 104.020 ms 124.070 ms
XX ae-1.r20.asbnva02.us.bb.gin.ntt.net (129.250.2.9) 103.490 ms 128.170 ms 109.354 ms
XX as-1.r20.dllstx09.us.bb.gin.ntt.net (129.250.3.42) 147.037 ms 168.994 ms 137.006 ms
XX ae-2.r07.dllstx09.us.bb.gin.ntt.net (129.250.3.67) 147.517 ms ae-7.r08.dllstx09.us.bb.gin.ntt.net (129.250.2.154) 142.261 ms ae-2.r07.dllstx09.us.bb.gin.ntt.net
            (129.250.3.67) 136.803 ms
XX xe-0-4-0-4.r08.dllstx09.us.ce.gin.ntt.net (157.238.224.174) 150.740 ms xe-0-4-0-3.r07.dllstx09.us.ce.gin.ntt.net (157.238.224.142) 155.470 ms xe-0-4-0-
            4.r08.dllstx09.us.ce.gin.ntt.net (157.238.224.174) 151.680 ms
XX h3.hotfile.com (74.120.10.111) 153.151 ms 151.471 ms 150.152 ms

what's that skippy? a 'transparent' network monitoring box looking at all the web traffic going to hotfile.com you say?...

Its Virginmedia, we're used to this sort of shit from them...

Re:welp....

[Fatal67]

Encrypted p2p traffic looks just like encrypted p2p traffic. Most dpi vendors already have fingerprints for it.

Re:welp....

[devxo]

And they can just throttle all traffic then. Look, these are consumer level service that they're selling. It's not guaranteed, and you're not buying dedicated bandwidth. If you really want that, get a business level contract with dedicated bandwidth. It will just cost you a lot, but that's how it works.

Bandwidth isn't free, and the only way ISP's can sell good speeds to everyone is by "overselling" it. It's a technical limitation, there's not much they can do about that. I rather take a burstable 100mbit than guaranteed 1mbit anyway. If you want the latter, get it with a business contract.

Re:welp....

[FutureDomain]

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.

actually beneficial

[ILuvRamen]

What people don't realize is that they typically only throttle the download. So let's say there's a 10 megabit connection, it's probably 1 or 0.5 megabits upload. So if people have a slowed download, they spend more time uploading the unfinished parts which means more sources which means a faster download on peer to peer networks. So they can do that all they want, they're just basically going to make leechers host files longer.

Not True

[Spad]

Firstly, they've been doing this since before Christmas and it doesn't just affect uploads but does appear to be largely port-based throttling. It's pretty poor at "identifying" P2P traffic and a lot of people have had problems with gaming performance since they started trialling it.

Secondly, this is what happens when you have a race to see who can claim to have the "Fastest home broadband", as has happened in the UK. When Virgin's top package was 10MBit, they didn't have any traffic management in place, but as soon as they jumped it to 20MBit to "beat" the ADSL providers offering 12MBit, they introduced their "STM" system for management and it's only got worse as they've jumped to 50MBit and now 100MBit. Yes, they've been upgrading their network infrastructure, but not fast enough to cope with the "upgrades" in speed that they're offering their users.

Finally, and probably sadly, they still offer one of the better broadband connection packages in the UK because, while they are increasingly crippling your connection for large parts of the day, at least they're open about it and when it's *not* being crippled it's better that 99% of the ADSL alternatives.

Re:Translation

[mjwx]

Virgin media have just finished rolling out 50Mbps download, just started rolling out 100Mbps

VDSL or Fibre?

If it's VDSL I call BS on you because once you get about 1 KM of copper between you and the exchange that speed drops to ADSL2 speeds (at the same distance).

If it's Fibre, I ask what their coverage is, and then call BS on you using that coverage data.

and are in the process of doubling their upload speeds, so I call bull on you.

But what's the point?

When they can say, we'll throttle x connection down to 2 Mbit, what good is a sync speed of 100 Mbit?

Re:Translation

[timbo234]

In the case of Australia plenty was done to provide real competition, and we now have tons of ISPs strongly competing against each other. The problem was that the underlying physical network was owned by the privatised formerly-government monopoly and there was no realistic way for someone else to run their own cables to every home and business in the country, thus we have the NBN. A public monopoly providing fibre is better than a private monopoly providing shitty copper cable, slow speeds and stingy bandwidth limits.