Virgin to Introduce Phorm and throttle torrents?

According to sources it seems Virgin will adopt Phorm as well as target torrent downloads:

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/12/16/virgin_bittorrent/

http://government.zdnet.com/?p=4227

http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2008/dec/16/phorm-internet

Just think how wonderful it will be to be allowed to browse web pages on a 50mbps connection!!

I hope neither of these turn out to be true.

As long as they don't throttle usenet.

John.

Thanks for the links.

Personally, I have no issue with the traffic management relative to its impact on other users at the time of management as implemented in the Allot technology for torrent P2P traffic or newsgroup downloads for that matter. The impact of delays at certain periods should have only nuisance impact for such users and allow a majority of users to do what they have to do. For me, this is much preferable to black and white (or is it?) STM.

I do have issue if the same technology is used more generally and this prevents me from watching streamed video content for example.

Net Neutrality is a religion in the US and is driven by fundamental rights so it is claimed. Frankly, I do not see the reality of sensibly and economically managing network traffic for all users with a large imbalance of load constantly devoted to a minority of users. Will it kill innovation? I don't believe so.

In the case of Phorm or any other attempt to profile my use , I don't like it. If the ISP's are allowed to manage their networks better through use of Allot type technologies this alone should help in the economics department and maybe reduce the need to even think about "Phorming" us with or without the advertising part of the equation; at least without our specific permission (in return for a lower tariff perhaps - but not for me).

Just my views, disagree if you have to.

Sid.

Find an SSL provider - AFAIK you can't deep packet inspect SSL.......
......however if they suddenly notice a massive jump in SSL traffic they may add that to the shapped traffic list!

Other ISPs using DPI simply throttle everything to the Relakks tunnel endpoints.

SSL to Usenet providers is futile against shaping. It's not a huge leap to guess what connections to news.giganews.com over SSL are doing and shape accordingly.

Does that mean it's no good?

Is there an alternative?

That is true, however this is all rumours at this stage......we can burn those bridges when we get to them.