Virgin Media CEO Says Net Neutrality Is Already Gone

Virgin Media CEO Says Net Neutrality is "A Load of Bollocks". Anyone here been shaken down by their Internet Service Provider? "The new CEO of Virgin Media is putting his cards on the table early, branding net neutrality 'a load of bollocks' and claiming he's already doing deals to deliver some people's content faster than others... If you aren't prepared to cough up the extra cash, he says he'll put you in the Internet 'bus lane.'"

Finally, some honesty.

[urbanriot]

Finally a company is honest enough to admit that net neutrality doesn't exist. Here in Canada, almost every ISP is throttling torrents, throttling DSL 'nodes', circumventing advertisements for their own, prioritizing certain web pages, and worse. This is rarely publicized until some intelligent people discover it and bring it to light and since there's no rules or laws, it's perfectly acceptable by everyone but the consumer.

Re:Unfortunately...

[pdbaby]

Actually, old bean, this is the United Kingdom we're talking about in this article :-)

Re:That sound you hear...

[jbb999]

So go find an honest ISP like this one [aaisp.net]. Yes they have some limits on how much data you can use in a month but they don't secretly block or throttle stuff are completely up front and honest about it and don't pretend you can get unlimited usage when it's a complete lie like most ISPs.

Re:Unfortunately...

[sweatyboatman]

I believe "Joe Sixpack" commonly refers to the common practice of selling beer in packs of six.

To answer your question, this guy is talking about charging content providers for faster throughput. Which implicitly is saying that they're going to slow down service for the majority of sites that don't pay the toll.

So while I am sure your $10 is appreciated, it's not going to help with this kind of tiered pricing.

Re:This is Hilarious

[Pax681]

Mr Rose, check out www.bethere.co.uk they hump everyone else on price(bang for buck) at 22 per month for up to 25mb down and 2.5mb up! they also do not have limits on downloads. swapped to them last november and am loving it HUGE they also have 24 hour tech and customer support. they truly kick ass. hope your exchange has their equipment bud. luckily i stay close to my exchange so and pretty near full tilt!

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Re:This is Hilarious

[Anonymous Coward]

Virgin media service quality is basically a postcode lottery. Because of their 60:1 contention ratio you will only get decent bandwidth if you happen to share your connection with a lot of light users. My guess is that the reason he's saying this is because his company is completely incapable of delivering the 24mb connections that they advertise. They hugely oversell their capacity and now they're trying to make excuses for not being able to provide it.

I currently live in the area around Bradford university and found their 24mb service to run at about 256k most of the time. The highest I ever saw it reach was about 5mb, at around 7am. Apparently all the tech students in the area are heavy bandwidth users and never sleep. Granted this is probably a worst case scenario.

I refused to sign the contract they sent me, and fortunately they wont charge you if you cancel within 30 days, so I guess I had a lucky escape.

Virgin's shaping - poorly executed

[The Mutant]

We're on Virgin ADSL. About one month ago, someone hacked our WEP and started leaching. It was all my fault - I'd replaced a router, didn't lock down by MAC address, and they locked on.

We noticed slowdowns / issues but didn't call Virgin until my wife determined these always happened after 4PM. This was after some three weeks of slowdowns.

Called Virgin's "pay as you go support", where a technician cheerfully told us we'd been capped due to a violation of AUP.

Ok. Someone had leached our connection. Our fault. But it took TWO weeks to get uncapped.

All this after several weeks of leaching - which impacted ALL customers on our local net mind you - no email, no call, nothing. Until we incurred expense calling their "pay as you go support".

Virgin's shaping is poorly executed, and heavy handed.

Re:That sound you hear...

[Nursie]

How fast is it?

I have 24Mbps service from bethere.co.uk

Sure, it suffers from real speeds bein anywhere from 13 to 20, but that's still a good chunk.

Re:That sound you hear...

[gigne]

I am currently on the 50Mbps trial, but most places get 20Mbps. The contention is fairly high so it seems to max out at about 14-6mbps at the quietest times.

Re:That sound you hear...

[mikael]

Already have done - After Virgin Media decided to unlaterally drop Sky One and Sky News from their channel selections, 44,000 subscribers switched to Sky. Others like myself decided to cancel their premium rate channel subscription, and pay only for broadband service. The first sign of trouble was when Virgin decided that they wouldn't "bamboozle their customers with technical details", but instead to refer to all service options using S, M, L, and XL.

Digital Spy forums [digitalspy.co.uk] have in-depth discussions about Virgins financial status. In particular "Virgin Media TV channels have posted a loss for the past two quarters." [digitalspy.co.uk]

Not surprisingly, Virgin are in the process of increasing their service fees (a +1 pound/month surcharge for paper bills), and an increase for daytime telephone calls, (from 3.25 pence/minute to 4.00 pence/minute) for anyone doesn't have an XL service.

Trying to extract some revenue from their content producers seems to be the next moneymaking scheme.

Re:The wrong way round

[jschen]

he's already doing deals to deliver some people's content faster

Typical bit of marketing here - this shouldn't be allowed to stand. Deals aren't being done to deliver content "faster" - deals are being done to deliver other content slower. Bandwidth is a zero-sum equation.

But bandwidth isn't a zero-sum equation. New bandwidth can be added. I have no clue what size deals we're talking about, but what if it actually is enough to financially justify the cost of additional bandwidth?

Re:That sound you hear...

[Anonymous Coward]

Here in the uk you have a choice, DSL or Virgin Media. DSL has and always will be an extremely variable pile of crap over here thanks to BT's wise decision to use something cheaper than copper for alot their phones lines. What choice do we have? When you bring price into the matter you've got Virign Media which on average charge you less than £20 for both phone and internet (and the tv which they basically shove in your face for free even if you don't want it) or you've got any other service which insists you have a bt line (generally £15 as a minimum) on top of the price of their internet connection. Contrary to other views in this post, Virgin Media is held back by where they are available because of the fact that they own and lay their own network, whereas BT were here first and are everywhere. They admit they do these things, (they claim) they haven't done any secret testing with such things as phorm but they are up front about the fact that they are interested in it. This is not to say I like Virgin Media but sometimes you have to choose the lesser of evils.

Re:A Translation, Me Hearties-

[Jeff DeMaagd]

IANAL, so does anybody know if these kinds of deals might have the effect of invalidating an ISP's 'common carrier' protections?

I think it's some Slashdotters that are perpetrating the myth that "common carrier protections" exist for data providers. As far as I know, that's not true, that it's only for voice, as in POTS.

Re:Virgin's shaping - poorly executed

[e4g4]

Slightly OT, but if someone is savvy enough to hack a WEP encrypted network, they'll be savvy enough to sidestep MAC address restrictions - use WPA2, or even a RADIUS/VPN solution if you want real security.

Re:That sound you hear...

[Charcharodon]

Cancel?! I would run out in a second and RE-SIGN up for a Virgin cable modem. The garbage that BT peddles as internet service is so horrible that I'll take Virigin's offering again in a heart beat, but unfortunately if you are not "in town" (aka London/ or 1/4 mile from your local high street(main street)) pretty much BT is all you get.

Having BT service is like having the honor to pay someone else to fuck you in the ass. Sure the internet is cheap ($40 for up to 8mbps, well it's never been faster than an an unstable/laggy 1.3mps), but it's the mandatory phone line that adds up for $25 a month, with the $10 low activity fee (who uses the phone anymore), and the $260 service reconnect fee (the previous tenet changed providers, but you still had to have a BT line, so I don't know why I had to be "reconnected" to BT.

To top it off I spent a month in a half screaming at someone in India trying to get the connection to connect at something above 300kps. They had a hard time typing in the settings that determined the quality of my service and then hitting the save button.

I wish I had my Virigin cable modem again, traffic shapping or no.

Re:counter attack

[Anonymous Coward]

There is a current spat between the BBC and the ISP's here in the UK. The BBC recently launched their iPlayer service which allows UK viewers to watch programmes again after they have been broadcast. Windows users can download programmes, and a P2P technology is used to spread the load.

The BBC has recently been criticised by ISPs for causing a major load on their networks. The BBC responded by threatening to name ISPs who thorttle their service. ISPs have countered with demands for payment.

I suspect that these comments by the Virgin chap is the latest salvo.

Re:That sound you hear...

[Anonymous Coward]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M4_motorway#Special_features [wikipedia.org]

Re:That sound you hear...

[xaxa]

My parents just signed up for bethere.co.uk. They live in a village of 2000 people.

The previous tenants in my flat had Bulldog (i.e. had disconnected the BT line). I rang BT, they said that because of this they'd change me £X to reconnect the line. I said I'd use Bulldog then. Oh look, suddenly the reconnection fee is £0.

Re:That sound you hear...

[cstdenis]

But they won't. They'll tell iTunes.comd or bbc.com "if you want your customers on our network to get more than 50k access to you, it'll cost you $10,000 a month"