Traffic Shaping In The UK: Who's Honest And Who's Not...
from the sound-familiar? dept
While we've mostly been focused on the debates over traffic shaping and false advertising in the US with the likes of Comcast and Verizon in the US, there's an interesting parallel over in the UK. Just like Verizon, it appears that Virgin Media's broadband offering is advertised as unlimited, even as the reality suggests quite differently. It's "unlimited within a fair-usage limit." That sounds like "limited" to me. In fact, the article notes, a Virgin Media user paying for unlimited service could find his bandwidth suddenly capped after just 20 minutes of straight downloading. That seems like quite a limit.Much more interesting, however, is the story of Plusnet, an ISP that was recently bought by BT. It does traffic shaping, but unlike just about every other ISP, is incredibly honest and upfront about what it's doing. This is exactly what many people have been telling Comcast it should do. There are supporters of Comcast's efforts who insist that if Comcast did such a crazy thing as to actually tell its customers what it's doing, it would ruin the whole plan. However, the details from Plusnet show that's not the case at all. Plusnet makes it very clear what it's doing, explains to users what to expect, and even helps them understand when it makes more sense to use high bandwidth applications. According to the few supporters of Comcast out there, this would never work -- and yet, it clearly does work for Plusnet. Not only that, the article notes that Plusnet's customer satisfaction rating has been growing steadily. So, once again, we'll ask what could possibly be wrong with Comcast telling the truth about the fact that it's using traffic shaping to prevent certain actions?
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Filed Under: false advertising, traffic shaping, uk
Companies: bt, plusnet, virgin media
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Virgin "Media"
http://allyours.virginmedia.com/html/internet/traffic.html
The Virgin Media "Traffic Management" policy goes along the lines of, if you download too much between 4pm-12pm your up/down speeds will be limited for up to four hours. That's not bad considering other ISPs, plus Virgin Media actually own their own network unlike most ISPs.
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Re: Virgin "Media"
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Spam
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Re: Spam
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Re: Re: Spam
I don't think any of the larger ISPs use this utility (NetEuqlizer) to shape with. Most are very tight lipped. Sandvine is used to re-direct p2p (to keep it on a providers network to save money.) I believe many of the larger ISPs in the US utilize Sandivine.
You also might want to check out this article. It talks about all the techniques ISPs use to mess with traffic and the morals of such usage.
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1895,2155140,00.asp
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Re: Spam
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To be fair
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Re: To be fair
It is extremely easy to download 3GB but why are you saying it has to be in 20 minutes? you can't download more than 3GB A DAY without being throttled. And as for the "they are perfectly open" statement that is untrue. What they say is: "we sometimes moderate the speeds for the top 5% of customers" but say it's your first day of owning VM broadband and you download a large file YOU WILL BE THROTTLED!! so their openess is made up of total lies.
I hope their 50Mb service completely fails. Who in their right mind would want to pay for a top enthusiast level BB that you can't even use when the rest of the country is awake....
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Some Virgin Media users are not male: “his” should be “their”.
Also, Virgin Media's limit applies from 4pm to midnight, not 4pm 'til noon.
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Re:
In US English, the proper word is his. I realize that British English has different rules for pronouns, but in this case (considering we're a US site) "his" is proper. "Their" only works if I was using the plural "users." Since I was using the singular, it is correct if I use either singular pronoun "his" or "her." I chose "his."
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Re: Re:
The political correctness madness in the UK has lead to morons using "their" when trying to be genderless in sentences and not using he/she.
They forget that "their" is a form of the possessive case of "they" but as are referring to a single user in your sentence it's quite correct.
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Re: Re:
That's the funniest thing I've ever heard - "British English"
It's ENGLISH! you know, a language you took from ENGLAND and completely screwed up just like every other language you try to adopt but choose to say most words incorrectly.
For such a large coutry you would have thought you could have come up with your own language.
The worste thing is that now with the constant flow of American TV in the UK my kids are learning to speak this nonsense!
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Virgin's a bit complicated, but thanks for the Nam
At times it was a difficult journey for PlusNet (Who I work for) and it took a couple of years of trying to get to the happy medium with our products that we have now. We had to have difficult discussions with some of our customers, but it could have been much worse (The biggest thing we learnt was that we needed to engage and be open with customers about the reality of our own economics). The pain was entirely worth it as we now have a network that is under control, products that are profitable and happy customers who have clear expectations.
Ian Wild
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The Business of throttling
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1895,2155140,00.asp
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Traffic shaping
Now in all honesty how the hell can they sell a product that you quite clearly can not use for what its intended, i mean why else would you want 20mbit residential internet if it isn't to have/use a big data stream for what ever reason or purpose and now they bring out 50mb, whats it gonna be capped to 10meg when you have downloaded 10gb.....utterly pointless, i don't know why they/we even bother, i have a good mind to report them to trading standards or the isp governing body ofcom is it?
this connection was great on telewest, no problems what so ever, as soon as Branson and these ntl morons get a wiff it all goes to shit
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nice topic!
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