Virgin Media CEO Says Net Neutrality Is Already Gone 378
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.'"
A Translation, Me Hearties- (Score:4, Interesting)
If so, I vote we prosecute him for downloading child porn, as a modern-day equivalent of walking the plank, and a warning to the other ISPs...
Yarrrrr!
Refreshing (Score:3, Interesting)
It happens that I believe that all should have equal access but then I do not run an ISP. It seems clear that multiple levels of service can be commanded by varying levels of payments. Sort of like steak or hamburger.
It will be interesting to see how all of this finally works out.
Re:Its the wrong term of reference (Score:5, Interesting)
Make no mistake, what this guy is talking about makes me very angry.
Re:That sound you hear... (Score:5, Interesting)
Of course - the only other alternative for digital TV would be freeview (limited channels) or Rupert Murdoch's Sky.
However, if enough people got wind of this, it would be possible to give Virgin a bit of a kicking financially.
Re:So Virgin Is the Enemy (Score:4, Interesting)
It doesn't hurt to underestimate the public's attention span and insight into its self-interest, because it's usually absent, especially in the face of distracting entertainment. Unless by underestimating you ignore when it's available as a powerful ally. In Net Neutrality, this has somehow turned out to be the case. Let's not pass it up.
Re:A market solution (Score:3, Interesting)
In all seriousness though, I would love to see Google sneak in a special version of their adwords. Every time a Virgin ISP user is served a Google ad, make sure one says:
Attention Virgin Media Customer
Your ISP is slowing your connection down to extort money out of you! Click here for more information!
This coming from Virgin...! (Score:3, Interesting)
Napoleon used to say: "I fear three newspapers more than a hundred thousand bayonets."
I hesitate between thanking this guy to state openly what the other ISP's have worked hard to disguise and warning him to watch the speed at which his brand will disintegrate...
Because, indeed, as the parent implies, Virgin's scheme means the end of the Internet as we know it, and we are really, really, not going to be happy about it...
You will regret that. (Score:4, Interesting)
It's only faster until they decide to shake down your favorite site or service. Then you might as well have dial up.
Their brazen admission of these practices is not better than alleged shameful practices. Both are wrong and both lead to the same place if the other companies are determined to rip everyone off. The practice can't be hidden for long, so what you have is a choice between ignorant leadership that may be evil or plain evil. Both suck.
Re:That sound you hear... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Isn't it the other way around? (Score:5, Interesting)
counter attack (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:That sound you hear... (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:counter attack (Score:2, Interesting)
Who is going to go to your artificially slow YouTube knock off when YouTube loads just fine? Switching to YouTube is a lot easier than switching ISPs, especially since there is monopoly control in many markets. You're only going to influence the number of people who both care and are able to switch - and only if they care enough about your content.
Quite interesting (Score:1, Interesting)
I live in Japan, which is a democracy and supposedly "free" country, but with many restrictions and bureaucracy that make it feel less than so. However, net connections have always been better than advertised.
First example is "best effort maximum speeds". Back in the day of 64Kbps and 128Kbps ISDN, there was a worry that everyone online, all at once, would cause a bottle neck. So the advertising said that the cheap plans were "best effort" speeds, and your mileage may vary. They said the same with ADSL, and then fiber. However, "best effort" really did mean the telco and provider's "best effort", and I have yet had a line that was slower than what you would expect from real world overhead issues with routers and your TCP/IP implementation simply being poor. With 100Mbps fiber, I really got 64Mbps throughput, up and down. That really isn't bad.
Then there's the "unlimited access" thing. When they say unlimited, they mean it over here. I have never, ever heard of a case where a provider cracked down on a user because they were going over some invisible threshold. Actually, I've heard the opposite from a Telco/ISP employee who was talking off the record. He said that the fiber lines typically run into a 1Gbps line via a router that houses anywhere from 20 to 50 users. However, these routers are monitored, and if throughput drops too much, they'll investigate who's hoarding. The solution is... move the hoarder off to a different router that has less traffic so that everyone is satisfied.
And finally, there's the net neutrality issue. I have not done serious research into this over here, but I have never heard of taking your line for ransom. I haven't even heard of bandwidth throttling for that matter, and while they MAY do it, they're pretty darn good at not letting it get spotted. None of my traffic has ever felt oddly slow compared to anything else.
Some argue that it's because Japan has such a centralized population, so getting a network out isn't as hard. While there is a small bit of truth to that, I must also add that I now live way out in the boonies called Hokkaido, in a small town, and while I don't have ISDN yet, I do have ADSL. 50Mbps down, 10Mbps or so up. That's not bad at all by any standard. (OK, OK, the grandma in Sweden will kick my bandwith's butt, but it's still faster than most U.S. lines.)
Virgin Media is "a load of bollocks" (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:So Virgin Is the Enemy (Score:3, Interesting)
I think we have Comcast & BitTorrent to thank for that. Using torrents to download music/movies/etc. is apparently far more mainstream than we thought. So when Comcast started interfering with torrent traffic, and said interference started getting media attention, people got pissed and wanted something done about it.
The real questions are will they stay pissed long enough for something to get done, and will they manage to not get mislead by some of the slimeballs wanting to destroy the Internet as we know it.
Re:So Virgin Is the Enemy (Score:3, Interesting)
The cat is out of the bag. It's going to cost the telcos and cablecos a lot more than they expected to put it back in there.
Re:That sound you hear... (Score:2, Interesting)
Heard it was good from where? (Score:3, Interesting)
I ask because this is the second time in as many days I've heard someone say this so I'm intrigued to know why and where people are hearing this from?
DSL Zone [dslzoneuk.net]If you look at sites like this:
ISP Review [ispreview.co.uk]or this:
They're fairly consistently rated as almost worst ISP there is.
I'm wondering if Virgin have run some kind of successful whisper campaign to hide the truth about their service?
Re:That sound you hear... (Score:3, Interesting)
Or the Sky whose flagship channel, Sky One, is no longer available on Virgin?
Ever since Telewest and NTL merged they've been going merrily to Hell. As far as I can gather, they've done an HP/Compaq - taken the worst aspects of each company and thrown away the best.
Re:That sound you hear... (Score:1, Interesting)
We need to stop ranting and instead start discussing ways to protect freedom of information and privacy. ISP's have a very real problem in that bandwidth is not free and a small percentage of users do in fact use the majority of bandwidth. The real problem is more about truth in advertising. We share bandwidth and the routers can only handle so much traffic.
A simple scheme like throttling my connection by default while allowing me to temporarily increase it for large downloads would be fine. I don't want my downloads constantly slowed to a crawl because of my neighbors addiction to hi rez video porn. I could get my linux ISO's quickly while he would just have to wait for his constant bittorrent of flesh.