Virgin Media to apply more throttling
FooAtari
"UK Internet Service Provider (ISP) Virgin Media has announced that it
will begin throttling both P2P and Newsgroup traffic at "Peak" times it
has emerged.
The ISP which advertises itself as "The fastest in the UK" and offers
speeds of up to 100mb has said it needs to throttle file sharing traffic
to prevent slowness in other areas such as online multiplayer gaming."
http://www.unitethecows.com/content/359-virgin-media-uk-begins-throttling-
p2p-traffic.html
Fastest or not, don't think I would go near them with the FUP they have
in place. Although bit of a moot point as not available up here anyway!
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Scott
<allie.f...@MTRPgooglemail.com> wrote:
>Something to watch out if you are on Virgin Media
>
>"UK Internet Service Provider (ISP) Virgin Media has announced that it
>will begin throttling both P2P and Newsgroup traffic at "Peak" times it
>has emerged.
>
>The ISP which advertises itself as "The fastest in the UK" and offers
>speeds of up to 100mb has said it needs to throttle file sharing traffic
>to prevent slowness in other areas such as online multiplayer gaming."
>
>http://www.unitethecows.com/content/359-virgin-media-uk-begins-throttling-
>p2p-traffic.html
>
>Fastest or not, don't think I would go near them with the FUP they have
>in place. Although bit of a moot point as not available up here anyway!
Glad I Sugared them (Virgin Media, you're fired').
Woody
news:bv0dn6t8igcd8vkgn...@4ax.com...
Always amazes me that people read what they want to read.
Virgin have announced that they will be limiting <uploads> during
peak times. That is the new bit - they have been traffic shaping
downloads for ages. And again I suspect they have not explained
it all as reading between the lines I think the limits are being
put on large uploads to newsgroups which suggests binary groups.
I don't see how they could have problems with the odd few K of
ASCII such as we poor souls emit?
--
Woody
harrogate three at ntlworld dot com
Hugh Jampton
> Always amazes me that people read what they want to read.
>
> Virgin have announced that they will be limiting <uploads> during
> peak times. That is the new bit - they have been traffic shaping
> downloads for ages. And again I suspect they have not explained
> it all as reading between the lines I think the limits are being
> put on large uploads to newsgroups which suggests binary groups.
> I don't see how they could have problems with the odd few K of
> ASCII such as we poor souls emit?
Been with Virgin for 10 years and never had problems with text newsgroups.
Until this week !!! Big problems since Saturday !! *Very* slow and often
unable to connect - not good.
Unless it improves I will have to leave Virgin. I'm not paying £20 pm for
this nonsense :-(
--
Regards,
Hugh Jampton
Geo
<snip>
> And again I suspect they have not explained
>it all as reading between the lines I think the limits are being
>put on large uploads to newsgroups which suggests binary groups.
>I don't see how they could have problems with the odd few K of
>ASCII such as we poor souls emit?
I can assure you that at "peak" times it can take 5 to 15 seconds to download a
single text post on VM.
--
Geo
River Tarnell
Geo <hw9j...@dea.spamcon.org> wrote:
> I can assure you that at "peak" times it can take 5 to 15 seconds to download a
> single text post on VM.
A typical text post is around 5KB (or less), so this would suggest
Virgin are rate-limiting it to 1KB/s. Even for them, that seems
somewhat excessive.
- river.
Geo
wrote:
I think they pick a fixed total bandwidth for P2P + USENET so as more people
(try) to use it each individual receives less.
And yes - it is way down on dial-up speeds.
--
Geo
Nick
That doesn't sound right to me.
Are you sure they aren't throttling by delaying connections rather than
limiting bandwidth.
The Natural Philosopher
The simple way to do this is to shunt packets with NNTP headers into a
queue, and trickle them out one at a time.
Eventually the sending machines will not be receiving ACKS, and will
stop sending. Until an ack gets through. The net effect is to apply
total throttling to the entire NNTP/P2P traffic.
Its the same way you prioritise VOIP traffic, by always putting it at
the head of the queue. You can arrange to simply leave NNTP in the queue
till you have spare bandwidth.
its a vile way of delivering a substandard service when you have
congested links, by making sure that the least reputable (in your eyes)
and smallest consumer base gets pissed whilst most of your porn
surfing/gaming customers get what they think they have paid for.
The reality is that it dispalyes a real financial problem in the ISP
itself. To put it bluntly, the are either not charging enough to deliver
a quality service and pay for enough bandwidth, or else they are money
grabbing bastards who just don't care.
I dont have up to date figures, but my guess is that a reasonable cost
of ADSL is about £7.50 a month plus about £1 for every gigabyte thereafter.
Basically to pay 'haulage charges'
And furthermore, if you want decent evening and weekend performance for
e.g. gaming and usenet, go with a more 'business' oriented supplier.
They clag up during the day, and have loads of weekend capacity. In fact
to them, domestic customers are an additional source of revenue that
costs little extra to add on, and uses spare capacity up nicely.
The Natural Philosopher
It amounts to the same thing. The only difference being if you delay the
SYN packets or all the packets with NNTP port addresses.
Delay = throttling in TCP/IP land. Speed is (TCP window size over
delay). When operating below the raw speed capacity of any given link.
That's how TCP adjusts to slow links: the data is buffered into the
link, and emerges delayed..after a bit, the lack of response from the
far end causes the sending machines to stall, buffer and wait..
Throttling introduces selective buffering and delay to particular packet
types.
Geo
This is how their initial press release describes their USENET throttling:-
"designed to adapt to network conditions to ensure time-sensitive and
interactive uses – such as surfing or streaming high-definition video – remain
unhindered by non-time-sensitive traffic such as peer-to-peer and newsgroup
activity, reducing the possibility of annoying buffering that can occur when
trying to watch TV online at peak times. Using smart network monitoring, the
system will reserve at least 75 per cent of network resources for time-sensitive
traffic, "
I read that as we get 25% and the TV viewers get 75%.
--
Geo
Woody
news:ilasp1$7qe$1...@news.albasani.net...
Any suggestions of such a 'business orientated supplier' might
be?
The Natural Philosopher
Never had bandwidth issues bar Claranet who simply stopped my service
till I paid more money when I went over my download limit. That earned
them a MAC request and I moved to IDNET , Cheaper and just as uncluttered.
But I pay for it.
Adrian C
> Fastest or not, don't think I would go near them with the FUP they have
> in place. Although bit of a moot point as not available up here anyway!
>
We had Virgin's cables coming onto our property for an old videotron
connection long since deceased.
Yesterday, during a refit of the garage which they are threaded through,
I took great pleasure in chopping them completely out with wire cutters.
It felt strangely cathartic, as if virginity had been restored ;-)
--
Adrian C
Woody
news:8tuium...@mid.individual.net...
Kinky sod....
Jeremy Nicoll - news posts
> In this thread on Virgin's forum you can find a response by someone
> in the CEO's Office to my letter of complaint on this subject.
Do these packets that they are delaying contains the IP address of the NNTP
server that sent the data?
There's only a modest number of NNTP servers around, surely.
--
Jeremy C B Nicoll - my opinions are my own.
Email sent to my from-address will be deleted. Instead, please reply
to newsre...@wingsandbeaks.org.uk replacing "aaa" by "284".
The Natural Philosopher
> sn...@spambin.fsnet.co.uk (Sn!pe) wrote:
>
>> In this thread on Virgin's forum you can find a response by someone
>> in the CEO's Office to my letter of complaint on this subject.
>
> Do these packets that they are delaying contains the IP address of the NNTP
> server that sent the data?
>
Have to yes, or else who is to know what stream they belong to?
> There's only a modest number of NNTP servers around, surely.
>
Correct.
Not sure what your point is tho.
>
>
Jeremy Nicoll - news posts
Virgin are claiming they can't distinguish between plain-text and binary
newsgroups, so throttle it all.
I use the NIN NNTP server, which is plain text only. They could readily
identify packets from that, and other plain-text only servers, and not
throttle them.