Upload speed increased - officially announced & 50MB STM

http://pressoffice.virginmedia.com/phoenix.zhtml?c=2...

So the upload increases have been confirmed and there is a mention of the 50Mb STM, which if Ive read correctly only affects the upload and not the download, plus it will reduce the upload speed when capped back to more than you get now anyways!

The STM table (http://www.virginmedia.com/myvirginmedia/traffic-management-table.php)still has not been updated to confirm and not firm dates for each area either.


More info on this page:http://shop.virginmedia.com/help/traffic-management.htm

Looks like no figures for the upload cap, only "during peak (10am � 3pm and 4pm � 9pm) times we'll need to slow you back to 1.75Mb if your upload usage is particularly high."
Not sure why 3-4pm is not peak, but there you go!

Also, it mentions about filesharing / p2p / usenet slowdowns for 50Mb users too. I'm assuming that's new as I'm not heard of that on 50Mb before (I could be wrong of course)

Edited by deleted (Thu 30-Sep-10 12:04:01)

Hmmm, been waiting to hear about this

I'm on 50mbit and tend to upload a lot, which means the increase to 5mbit is very welcome. However I suspected they'd add traffic management, there has been absolutely none so far for 50mbit users.

But if they're only limiting to 1.75mbit at least thats not less than our currently uncapped 1.5mbit, which is still a benefit albeit pretty small. I'll burn through the upload caps pretty much instantly so the 5mbit benefit will only be for short bursts each day.

Still nice to see they've handled this well, I'm interested in seeing what the 100mbit comes with, it should have 10mbit up to maintain this new 10:1 ratio they're sticking with, if that comes uncapped I might be upgrading, if it's capped like the others i'll just stick with 50mbit.

*edit*

They've confirmed the 50mbit upload cap here:

http://www.virginmedia.com/myvirginmedia/faster_uplo...

3pm to 8pm
6000Mb limit
65% speed reduction (1.75mbit)
5 hour cap

No daytime caps though!

Actually that's as bad as I thought it would be, I was expecting not much more than about 2000Mb based on their previous trends for caps. I guess this is subject to change though

Edited by deleted (Thu 30-Sep-10 13:18:58)

LOL - 6GB in 5 hours!!

I think the vast majority of users will be safe.

Edited by deleted (Thu 30-Sep-10 13:58:10)

It's about 2 hours 40 mins of uploading at max speed.

Most of that will go on p2p, you don't think a p2p network will readily suck down that much data given the opportunity

and limiting filesharing to 3Mb uploading for 5 hours during the day is going to kill people??
Still means 40GB of uploading a day without hitting caps.

That's a whole lot of Linux ISOs

haha, yeah...it is quite a lot, I'm not really complaining, I knew STM was on the way for 50mbit it was only a matter of time.

I have a funny feeling that it will be largely moot for the 50mbit users, VM talked about traffic priority, if that is quite aggressive then we may never see full torrent upload speeds during these times anyway.

Yup someone has to host these linux ISO's, good thing I threw myself on that grenade

i see the traffic management is being implemented for torrents and usenet access, i currently have a SSL connection to my news provider i assume that as virgin are not going to shape SSL then it will circumvent any usenet shaping ???

Can they use packet inspection to determine protocol? Pretty sure ISPs have been doing that ever since people started randomizing ports for bit torrent.

In fact I'm sure you can torrent through SSL as well if the tracker supports it (some private ones do) and traffic shaping still catches that I'm sure.

DPI has been available for non encrypted traffic for some time, but if it's SSL then they can't use DPI so in that instance they simply look at the port carrying the traffic and hit the typical ones for SSL.

I know that usenet is typically port 563 SSL but several providers look like they offer SSL over ports 80 and 443 as well which will probably throw that off as they can't block what might be web traffic.

I know nothing about torrents so is there a common port?? If so, I'm guessing again that will be the one that gets hit.

Edited by deleted (Thu 30-Sep-10 19:13:04)

In reply to a post by mrstella:

i see the traffic management is being implemented for torrents and usenet access, i currently have a SSL connection to my news provider i assume that as virgin are not going to shape SSL then it will circumvent any usenet shaping ???

No it won't. It's very obvious what 10 connections, even over SSL, to news.giganews.com are.

The news providers offer SSL to protect your privacy not to evade shaping.