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

[xullrae]

The worst thing is that they generally don't tell you about it when you sign up. We had similar problems here - but what they do here is limit your speed to something ridiculous like 24kb/s after you've downloaded a certain amount of data. We couldn't figure out why somedays we couldn't even check our email until someone told us what was happening. Very annoying.

[koldun]

Thats stupid, its hardly a 'unlimited' like they advertise is it?
The ISP's in the UK seem to have only just implemented this little feature, hopefully the ISP's here won't follow their example :/

[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

[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/

[nebtheconfused]

I've been running with this for about a year now with NTL or vorgin if you use these new fangled names.To be honest i havn't noticed any issues.

My router is set to give my leech box about no priority at all and the games machine has max priority, even when being capped between 4pm and bedtime i still get about 15-25pings on UK servers.

The only time i get issues is uploading photos to flickr, no matter what settings i try that just hogs my whole upstream and kills the connection. But never mind i dont upload that many pics!