Nanny state i've heard some of you cry?

[koldun]

Vedma came home today in a foul mood with the UK ISP's and here is why:

...What Virgin has to say...

...Another from the Guardian showing that Virgin are not alone in this...Now, while you may think that stopping countless numptys from using your bandwidth to download the latest vomit inspiring dross from this weeks talentless reality TV stars might

Comments

[malcygoff]

Err, ISPs have been doing that for ages. I have never known a truly "unlimited" ISP, the recent change for the majority is that they are now making it public (something that pussnet/F9 have been doing forever) and reducing the limits. sup>[1]

Anyway, as the traffic management only kicks in after a AUP has been breached, it isn't as if innocent gamers are being targetted. Rather, the core demographic that is affected are the people who bit torrent 24/7.
You can do a test of this yourself but putting a data logger on the line when running a couple of online games, versus a standard movie BT.[2] The difference is massive, it's also pretty clear that you're not going to have problems with the capacity unless you're on the lowest possible tariff.[3]

Now, if one is a BT'ing gamer you'll be affected but that's a decision that is in the hands of that individual.

This should be something that us normal users should embrace: for our traffic to be given a higher priority than the BT streams should be a good thing, actually leading to better response times and less dropped packets (although, packet loss is very rarely a sign of high latency but network gear such as cheap routers, phone extension cables, broken filters, REN overloading, sync issues, etc).

Me? I pay for 20gb a month - but I seem to only use 5-6gb of it: this includes webstuff, gaming, music from iTunes, TV from BBC's iPlayer and C4 on demand, along with the odd CD ISO and a fair bit of work traffic over the VPN. So I don't see anything to get worried about, but then all of my game traffic is high priority because I have a special Gamers package.

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[1] Interestingly, the ISPA have been heavily involved with the legal issues surrounding the use of the word "unlimited" and it had been agreed that the current format (using an asterix with a footnote pointing to the Acceptable Usage Policy) is clear enough for users to understand; personally I think that is the area that needs more scrutiny.

[2] there are other risks to bit torrents too, aside from the moral and legal questions surrounding them; leaving an open connection running between hosts on any network means that any snoopers have a valuable line of traffic to investigate to establish more about your network. I've used this in the past for my own ends, and I'm not that great at network forensics.

[3] if that's the case then you have to make the decision about how important your online traffic is - i.e. is it worth the extra couple of quid a month to have the higher rate of service. This I find acceptable, afterall, it's the same as a second class postage stamp getting a letter delivered later than a first class stamp; the reason? because that class of service costs less!

[koldun]

Tiscali have either implemented a tougher throttle or just introduced it as Vedma spend all Friday sorting out the mass of problems it was causing, Virgin also seem to have only recently implemented it.
I agree that BT'ing gamers have made their own bed so to speak, but if gamers are getting hit by tougher throttles too it may stop the all day/all night gaming sessions. The constant traffic from games may not be enough to cause the throttles to kick in, but take vedma and me as an example:
Patch the game, browse the web, check several mail acounts and run two game clients at the same time over one connection. That will be pushing it towards the 'oh nose its a torrent' limit.

[malcygoff]

Virgin have toughened up their rules, but only to cater for specific times of day - not sure about Tiscali (never liked em anyway! hehe)

Taking your point forward, I would be interested to know your actual bandwidth usage of a typical month; seriously: mine is averaging 5gb/month over the last three months. If you were to double that usage to 10gb, you're still only looking at 300mb a day - which was actually the limit of the cheapest tariff mentioned in one of the pages you linked.

By the way, I don't suppose that Rox is supporting LoTR online? I've got a colleagues PC in my office that's suffering with graphical artifacts in it...

[vedma]

yep i am...
check out this site. Turbine are pretty good.
http://turbine.fuzeqna.com/lotro.support/