02 says will slow speeds of BitTorrent, Newsgroups, and other P2P services in order to help its “broadband flow better.”
O2, a leading provider of mobile and broadband services to consumers and businesses in the UK, has announced new peak hour traffic management protocols in order to ensure that all customers are able to access “vital services” like e-mail and streaming video.
It blames P2P programs and newsgroups that “some people run on their computers all day and night” for making it “much slower” for others trying to do simple and brief tasks online.
As such it plans to throttle both during the peak traffic hours from 8-11pm.
“We want everyone to get the most from their broadband, whatever they use it for,” it says in a press release. “That’s why we’ve introduced this policy. To help your broadband flow better.”
Here’s the list:
File-sharing:
- BitTorrent
- Blubster
- Gnutella
- KaZaA
- WinMX_6688
- WinMX_6699
- eDonkey
- Filetopia
- eDonkey_UDP
- Hotline
- Hotline_1234
- DirectConnect
- GuruGuru
- Soribada
- Soulseek
- Ares
- Rodi
- JoltID
- eMule_UDP
- Waste
- Konspire2b
- ExoSee
- FurthurNet
- MUTE
- GNUnet
- Nodezilla
Newsgroups:
- NNTP
- NNTPS
- TAC_News
- Audio_News
- NTalk
- NetNews
- NAS
- DDI
- Giganet
It may not be too big a deal for most file-sharers, but you have to wonder whether or not O2 will decide at some later point to throttle P2P traffic throughout the day and not just during peak hours.
Stay tuned.
jared@zeropaid.com
.
UPDATE: It seems as though the throttling only affects those O2 customers who don’t subscriber to its own unbundled network. Specifically it’s the O2 Home Broadband Access that is affected.
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Just use a privacy tool like TorrentFreedom, and they wont know what protocol you’re using.
Done.
At least they are open about their practices.
If “privacy tools” catch on there to try to skirt throttling, the ISP will most likely just do what has been done in Canada: throttle -all- encrypted traffic while assuming it’s a P2P application. We’ve had to deal with this for many years now and it is just not going away.
Ouch that sucks…
Hopefully we can get the conservatives out of their minority rule and get a government in place that will pass a net neutrality law in Canada. Then they would not be allowed to throttle encrypted data.
hmm first 1 to start doing this
only thing mite help is to post on
http://petitions.number10.gov.uk/freefilesharing/
Not strictly true. In the UK ISPs either put their own equipment in the exchanges (LLU) or they use British Telecoms network to get to their own (IPStream) in exchanges that have not been LLU enabled yet. O2 will only be throttling those customers who’s exchange has not been enabled for O2s LLU network. O2s own LLU network is unaffected (at least at the moment).
Silversurfer, O2 are NOT the first to start doing this. Many ISPs do the same, some throttle only P2P, others throttle more. British Telecom and the Carphone Warehouse companies (AOL UK, Talk Talk and Tiscali) are probably the worst but others who throttle at peak times include Virgin, Sky and many, many others. Sky do have one completely unlimited package but it is NOT cheap.
This is very interesting the ISPs keep battling for control of the internet!
download to your seedbox then download the file via http.
This means not throttle. And another thing is that you can stream bittorrent video so by blocking bittorrent they are blocking streaming video. There has already been some bad pr about an isp blocking bittorrent then later finding out that it was a streaming video of some charity event. I think I read the story on torrent freak. Its been a while so a google search could pull it up prob.
“O2, a leading provider of mobile and broadband services to consumers and businesses in the UK, has announced new peak hour traffic management protocols in order to ensure that all customers are able to access “vital services” like e-mail and streaming video.”
i don’t believe that P2P is having much of an effect when compared with audio and video streaming services like the BBC iPlayer.
I would like to see some evidence of the problems O2 are alleging.