P2P & Newsgroup Traffic Management

I'm thinking of signing up for the 50Mbit XXL service, as I understand it P2P & Newsgroup traffic will be regulated during peak hours for all users no matter which VM package you are on. So how does this work in the real world. Can anyone on VM's 50Mbit XXL package who uses P2P or Newsgroups during peak hours detail their experiences, at what point were your speeds cut and how much were they cut by. Overall are you happy with the service you receive from VM ? Thanks in advance for any replies.

Edited by deleted (Tue 15-Feb-11 20:36:24)

don't really use p2p but on usenet from giganews, simply use port 443 and this bypass's the throttling. if not and you use 119 or 563 you get stuck on about 1.75MB/s compared to 6MB/s

good info thanks for that

In reply to a post by nvidamour:

don't really use p2p but on usenet from giganews, simply use port 443 and this bypass's the throttling. if not and you use 119 or 563 you get stuck on about 1.75MB/s compared to 6MB/s

That is not true on my father's 10 meg virgin connection i run port 443 on my newsserver and it's throttled.

In reply to a post by aj2703:

That is not true on my father's 10 meg virgin connection i run port 443 on my newsserver and it's throttled.

Good job he was asking about 50Mb then.

The poster i quoted said port 443 gets past throtteling. I said it does not on my fathers 10 meg. If the port is throttled i wouldn't have thought it would matter what package you are on, moreso if 563 is throttled too on all packages.

Correct. The shaping is on all products. It is only declared to be active part of the time and I'm not sure if they've finished experimenting with it as comments I've seen suggest it isn't active all the time they've said it will be.

If the VM kit can be fooled simply by running NNTP on the standard SSL port for HTTPS I'll be very surprised and VM will be looking for a refund from their DPI equipment vendor.

Edited by kwikbreaks (Mon 21-Feb-11 21:47:33)

I might not have been technically correct in that port 443 gets past throttling but what i've seen (and other people) is using it doesn't affect my download speed like the other ports do. This is at any time of the day. Generally i'd always see anywhere between 5.5 - 6MB/s

I'd also agree that it seems a very simple way to bypass the hardware they have put in place.

Remember that they're essentially on 2 different networks. Virgin's 10/20 meg offerings run over DOCSIS 2, whereas 30/50/100 are on their DOCSIS 3 network. Maybe that has something to do with it?

I've found that with torrents, during the day it does seem harder to get higher speeds, but if there are enough seeds (or some fast seeds), I can still max out this 30 meg line and get roughly 3.6 MB/s. 10am, 2pm, 5pm, 8pm etc.

In reply to a post by kwikbreaks:

Correct. The shaping is on all products. It is only declared to be active part of the time and I'm not sure if they've finished experimenting with it as comments I've seen suggest it isn't active all the time they've said it will be.

If the VM kit can be fooled simply by running NNTP on the standard SSL port for HTTPS I'll be very surprised and VM will be looking for a refund from their DPI equipment vendor.

Except it's not NNTP on port 443 it's NNTP inside TLS. The only ways to spot that would be via non-protocol based traffic analysis which is quite effective and the equipment is quite capable of if configured to do so which anecdotally it appears that it isn't.