Which of UK's major ISPs will let you have exotic p0rn? NONE OF THEM Virgin Media, Vodafone and EE have promised to be more upfront with their subscribers about traffic management policies two and half years after rival, big name UK ISPs signed up to the voluntary "Open Internet Code". The telcos have also vowed not to choke the services of competitors, such as over-the-top players – Microsoft' …
There is definitely something wrong with the interconnect between Virgin and Sky.
I get on average 1mb/s (often lower) downloading movies from Sky while a Steam game will come in at 12mb/s
I called Virgin about it once and explained what was happening, said they would forward it to second line support and within an hour I was getting much better performance.
I moved house the next week and the problems were back with my new connection so will have to call again and see what happens.
There is definitely something wrong with the interconnect between Virgin and Sky.
I get on average 1mb/s (often lower) downloading movies from Sky while a Steam game will come in at 12mb/s
There are so many reasons for getting a slow speed from a particular provider, it is much more likely to be congestion within Sky's network or capacity of their links rather than the connection between Sky and Virgin.
I'm on synchronous gigabit FTTP (Hyperoptic) in Central London, and can only download from Sky at around 8Mbit/s (1MB/s), whilst Steam and other well connected provider's downloads come down at between 400-700Mbit/s (50-80MB/s).
"Have you tried a different device? "
I found this with iPlayer the other day. I wanted to listen to a radio program and really wanted to listen to it while I was out walking. The radio iPlayer doesn't have a download and play later feature like the TV one, so I ended up Googling for tools to cheat (BEEB you stupid B*&^%$ds I'd pay to be allow to if that is what it took OK, just give us a chance) and found a tool to slurp down the streaming files. Suddenly a 30 minute radio program that kept pausing and buffering downloaded in a few seconds.
> When piracy is easier than getting free content legitimately, you know there's a problem somewhere!
Get_iplayer was a bit rough round the edges when I last looked.
Then I discovered nerdoftheherd's RadioDownloader, which admittedly is Windows-centric, but it did what it did very smoothly and effectively.
Then the BBC lawyers told him to take the BBC content out of his index or else. So he did, Then the programme became basically useless to me and to many others.
There presumably isn't a fundamental copyright issue because the BBC DG (Greg Dyke) in 2003 "announced plans to give the public full access to all the corporation's programme archives. Mr Dyke said ... that everyone would in future be able to download BBC radio and TV programmes from the internet." [1]. No sign of it since.
More recently in 2011 the BBC said their full speech radio archive would go online [2].
Will it ever happen?
[1] http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/3177479.stm
[2] http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/news/8865357/BBC-to-open-vast-radio-archive-online.html
Hanlons Razor: Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.
Have a search for "Virgin Media youtube buffering" and you get posts going back a long time. i.e http://community.virginmedia.com/t5/Up-to-120Mb-Speed/Tired-of-YouTube-buffering/td-p/1746698
Its unbelievable that they have had the same issue going for so long that affects a large swathe of their user base.
As I understand it the YouTube buffering problems are just that -- problems with YouTube.
I have seen them, though rarely it has to be said, on Vermin Media (which I've been using for years) but friends on BT lines and LLU have seen the same. Heck! a friend in Oslo has had problems with inexplicable YouTube buffering and I've seen it in Amsterdam and probably other places I can't remember.
I don't suggest that VM customers are mistaken in blaming Vermin in all cases -- but I am suggesting that when people spend a fair amount of money for broadband that they know will supply a decent bandwidth and YouTube won't play properly they are more likely to get out there and moan without necessarily knowing the cause.
Anecdotally for YouTube problems I find going to a lower or even higher resolution to help me on occasion that or justtaking a link to where the video is, closing the page and starting again where I left off.
iPlayer I've never had problems with from anywhere so can't commenton that one.
Thanks for the civilised reply Richard 12.
I have to admit I never found the problems repeatable enough to try a proxy or other tests. I'd love to know how those who voted me down know that YouTube is fine and the evidence I have seen to the contrary is rubbish when the problem seemed difficult enough to reproduce under Virgin.
I certainly won't mention the times I've had problems with a YouTube video at exactly the same time as a friend on another network in another city, perhaps thousands of miles away, and then find neither of us have problems with the same video the next day. Nope that never happened, it was always Virmin Media' plot against other networks...
I had similar buffering issues for a long time on YouTube. After moaning for years, I replaced a network switched - replacing a Netgear one I'd had for years. The buffering issue vanished overnight.
The Netgear switch was perfect for LAN file transfers, file downloads etc. but just hopeless at streaming media. Never had an issue since it was replaced, even streaming to multiple TVs concurrently is successful.
All anyone has to do if they try censorship of anything (including consenting adult material which prudes block) is to use an HTTPS web proxy or VPN provider; some services are even bundled with applications, so dead easy for less technically literate people.
"Not target and degrade the content or applications of specific providers"
cover the throttling of, say, a usenet provider?
Not for one moment saying that Virgin shouldn't be able to throttle - merely that they've previously been quite exceptionally opaque as to what they were up to previously.
My ISP is not on the list. They just give unfiltered access to the real raw internet. No proxies, no deep packet sniffing, blocked ports, traffic throttling and the other popular provider malfeasances.
They don't provide unlimited. You just get what you pay for and not other people's attempts to steal bandwidth for nothing. They also keep a low profile which means they miss out on tea and biscuits at Number 10 to exchange gongs for protecting our children, terrorists and cuddly kittens.
Its a novel approach. I am surprised so few are so not prepared to throw themselves into the clutches of big corporations with an appalling record of misleading and generally screwing their users with a fair dose of technical incompetence and incomprehensible support desks thrown in.
But then I guess, like all others, mine is just another brand name and operating unit of that overarching UK ISP also missing from the list: GCHQ.
"My ISP is not on the list. They just give unfiltered access to the real raw internet. No proxies, no deep packet sniffing, blocked ports, traffic throttling and the other popular provider malfeasances."
Which provider is it you're talking about? I'm always interested in supporting those who value privacy.
However, "no deep packet sniffing"... that's nothing anybody can possibly verify as this would usually be implemented in a completely transparent way. The other items can be verified, though, and I'm all for it
However, "no deep packet sniffing"... that's nothing anybody can possibly verify as this would usually be implemented in a completely transparent way. The other items can be verified, though, and I'm all for it
I'm with A&A, and Adrian (the boss) has repeatedly said that there is no packet inspection and that when there is he won't be allowed to talk about it, so we can assume that when he no longer says that there is no packet inspection we can assume there is. So all we have is his word that he won't lie and can't be forced to lie. I'm inclined to believe him.
Of course I, and most of their customers, are using BT supplied lines, so whether OpenReach are reaching into our packets to sniff out what we're doing, we have no way of knowing. For smaller ISPs that could well be how GCHQ do things.
I wonder when we'll be able to get IPSec links :-)
"I'm with A&A [...]"
Thanks for the reply. Thought you were with them, but wanted to see if there are other small providers who actually care. I do agree with you on their credibility. To my knowledge there hasn't been a single case where they were caught with pants down, so at the very least they get the benefit of a doubt!
As for IPSec per default, while that would be awesome, there are probably not enough customers asking for it. You could always work around that using a remote server somewhere to establish such a connection (or OpenVPN, which is easier to set up), where the remote server then acts as a proxy.
I'm doing the same on BT at the moment. They are probably wondering why pretty much all traffic is encrypted and hitting the same destination, especially as it's going to be outlawed soon *cough*. :-)
I resent the fact that you have branded those of us who want to download a large amount of data per month and have thus chosen an unlimited service as being thieves. I looked very carefully at the AUP of my provider to ensure that the service was genuinely unlimited - and am paying quite a bit more than the average to get it. "You get what you pay for" is all very well if you know exactly how much you are going to download each month, but it can easily leave you hostage to fortune if you do not ensure that you have complete control over every device and application that is pulling data from the Internet. Inadvertently leave a browser open on certain websites overnight after your PC puts the screen into powersave mode for example, and it could slurp gigabytes of data streaming news videos one after the other to a blank screen.
"I resent the fact that you have branded those of us who want to download a large amount of data per month and have thus chosen an unlimited service as being thieves."
I apologise, I used the wrong verb. The issue is that if you contract with an ISP that offers unlimited then, unless you get your fair shares worth - you are paying for someone elses's usage. And, of course, if instead everybody does try to regain equanimity then the ISP's peering goes into meltdown unless they throttle etc.
So while I am not accusing you of acting unfairly, your use of unlimited could be seen as unfair to the user who doesn't need it. I agree it is their problem to realise that and go with a 'limited' service. I run a small internet company and our usage is comfortably within our 200Gb monthly allowance. Of course that does involve downloading movies or online gaming. Horses for courses. Ours is Zen. Almost as good as A&A I'm told ;-)
Before you point out that your unlimited is cheaper than my limited - that's only if you don't value the other differences the alternate ISPs have compared to the big'uns.
Yup, it's the first time that I've felt both that an article is worth sharing, but also that the headline is so unrelated and clickbaity that I've had to edit it before hitting 'Tweet'.
Especially given that the reference to porn in the article refers to Child Porn, which isn't exactly what I think of if someone mentions exotic porn......
By other people's attempt to steal bandwidth do you mean customer attempting to use the service they pay for?
Very good that you have found an ISP that your happy with but that's no reason to turn on the rest of us. If the ISP's are offering unlimited packages why is that the fault of someone like me that signs up for it? I think your ire is directed at the wrong target it's the companies that offer packages they can't deliver that are at fault in my opinion.
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Doesn't the heading just mean that people should give the smaller ISP's a try. I have been with 2 ISP's over the last 10 years both nerdy & dedicated to leaving their customers alone. I only changed to my most recent one because they offer an unlimited service. (My wife discovered Iplayer & my son xbox-live so I had to).
Sure it's a little more expensive than the likes of Plusnet & Sky but it's absolutely worth the little extra cash.
They throttle their own site!
If you want to get onto their MyBT site they just fill your bandwidth with irrelevant 'news' articles so that by the time you get to 'Speed Test' (which is invisible once your logged in) the universe has undergone a heat death or two.
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