New virgin media Ceo: Net neutrality is a load of b*****cks

[alsenior]

From torrentfreak

Virgin Media CEO Says Net Neutrality is “A Load of Bollocks” | TorrentFreak

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”.

Net neutrality really is the hot topic at the moment. Ignited by the Comcast fiasco, the concept of net neutrality has certainly been brought into the mainstream. Most ISPs are never quite forthcoming about their throttling, capping and otherwise interfering behavior, but that crowd certainly doesn’t include the CEO of Virgin Media, the UK’s second largest ISP.

In an interview with the Royal Television Society’s Television magazine, far from covering up their intentions, Virgin Media’s new incoming CEO Neil Berkett - who joined the Virgin Media Board just a few days ago - has launched an attack on the ideas and principles behind net neutrality.

“This net neutrality thing is a load of bollocks,” he said, adding that Virgin is already in the process of doing deals to speed up the traffic of certain media providers.

With around 3.5 million customers in the UK, and already traffic shaping due to lack of capacity, it’s a sobering thought that at the behest of “content providers” with deep pockets, Virgin is prepared to speed up their traffic, which would presumably have a negative impact on those at the bottom of the ISP’s priority list, namely bandwidth hungry file-sharers.

Berkett then turned on the BBC and their iPlayer service, telling them - and other public broadcasters like them - that if they don’t pay a premium to gain faster access to Virgin Media’s customers, their service would be put into “bus lanes”.

It just shows that some ISPs are happy to throttle just about anyone in the name of profit, it’s just that most aren’t as open about it as Mr Berkett.

Well if Vm try and pull this off There losing me as a 8 Year customer with vm there has been alot i have stood for over the years ,this will seal the deal.

Note to New Vm ceo: Try it and you stand to annoy alot of long standing customers

[MadduckUK]

abandon ship everyone, no need to wait for phorm to take hold

[AndrewJ]

Yup I will jump ship also.

[Hicks12]

am i right in thinking he means, you will not get what you pay for and your speed will be limited for certain program e.g. bbc i player?
If so then they can kiss my money good bye, after about 10years of custom i hope they go bust .

[explicitlyrics]

There is no way they would get away with it. BBC (just as one example) would not be legally allowed to pay for the service on VM as it doesnt benefit everybody. Either they continue and lost most of their customer base or they stop, its a very simple decision for Virgin IMO.

[dave87]

Unfortunately I doubt they will realise this until the damage is done.

And lets face it, the general public aren't really going to care, because it only costs x amount a month.

It'll be the tech savvy they lose, and I've got to say, they probably aren't that worried, as they tend to be the heavier users, not the ones that check their email once a month.

[Betty_Swallocks]

Isn't it about time that ownership of the net is taken out of the hands of profit hungry vultures like Virgin?

It's no longer a luxury. It's an essential part of our society today and should be run on a non profit basis for the good of us all.

[Stoo]

I'm glad I'm with a real ISP - Zen.. shame it's based on BT's shambles that is ADSL..

[Methanoid]

I just wish VM would be honest about their Trafiic Shaping policy. It's supposed to be 4pm-9pm but there are a million and one people on CableForum who report it outside of those hours. My connection was "shaped" (i.e. slowed) last night and only "freed" at 11pm on the dot. Hardly 9pm!!! VM are not gonna keep customers if they keep spouting "bollocks" (to quote Mr Berkett!!)

[Betty_Swallocks]

The trouble is that VM are the only really fast connection that most people can get.
I only live about a mile and a half from the exchange buy Sky "up to 16Mb" have told me that the most I can expect will be 4Mb.

I get better than that from VM on cable when the traffic shaping is in place.

I don't like the way they operate. I especially hate the way they charged 25p a minute for access to their "support" department, if you can call a warehouse full of Indians reading from a script support. I know their stopping the charge soon. Obviously found it lost them more customers than it earned them.

But the bottom line is that I have a 20Mb connection and most of the time I get over 14Mb. This is waaaaay more than I'd be able to get over the phone line unless they find a magical way of transforming the millions of miles of copper wire under the street into fibre without it costing the GDP of a small African nation.

Sadly I'm stuck with Virgin for the forseeable future.

[Steve]

To the escape pods!

[TheAnimus]

Am i the only one who thinks this might of been miss interpreted a tiny bit?

Take Hexus for example. Hexus.Tv i'm assuming uses a lot of bandwidth.

I'm guessing the vast majroity of visitors are English/western europe or USA.

Lets pretend hexus has only £100 for bandwidth (because AMD are sponsering thme, not intel ), and each mbit to any contitent (which each only have one provider say) charge £1 per mbit. How much South America or South Africa should be bought?

Its a finite resource say, so who should loose out, obviously you can't ignore the majority, the greater good and all that crap.

Game servers are a classic example of this. Think of a UK game server, as most people will want the lowest ping, so good UK peerings are essential, but you still need a little bit of europe and USA, most clans generally have 1 foriegner in them.

[Mike Fishcake]

Unfortunately I doubt they will realise this until the damage is done.

And lets face it, the general public aren't really going to care, because it only costs x amount a month.

It'll be the tech savvy they lose, and I've got to say, they probably aren't that worried, as they tend to be the heavier users, not the ones that check their email once a month.

QFT.

It's all down to finances for most people. After all, who cares about caps, limits and shaping, because "WOW! BROADBAND FOR ONLY £6.49 A MONTH?"

[Lucio]

Hasn't there always been some kind of traffic shaping going on in the Internet though? After all, when we were all on dial-up, I remember there being huge issues with ISP's caching sites and delivering the cached version instead of the live one.

[badass]

This is great - the Iplayer quite possibly will bring the issue of traffic shaping to the masses since many will have heard of the iplayer and then wonder why it doesn't work properly. Then ISP's can introduce properly representative pricing. Charging the bandwidth hogs more whilst everyone else gets a decently fast connection.
I don't see why I should subsidise someone downloading 24/7 or have my connection slowed down because of them. I also dont expect my higher than average use to be subsidised by those that just use their broadband for a bit of web and email.
Of course if this makes the average punter into a bandwidth hog, even better! It will bring the issue of ridiculous contention ratios and insufficient capacity to the front and maybe get the telecoms infrastructure of this country up to date.

[Konan555]

After all, who cares about caps, limits and shaping, because "WOW! BROADBAND FOR ONLY £6.49 A MONTH?"

Exactly right there. I know I'm capped, limited and latent. And I don't care, it's cheap.

I only use the interweb at the weekend and it's mainly to do nothing more than browse. Even when I do make a large download I can wait for it. Not many years ago, I was on a v.92 modem and I remember it well.