Virgin Media CEO Says Net Neutrality is “A Load of Bollocks”
Written by enigmax on April 13, 2008The 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.
via DigitalSpy
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I think this whole thing is really messed up.
OK, first of all: people using the internet for real-time connections, like IMs Skype, deserve to get their traffic delivered first. I think we can all agree on that - at least to a certain extent. If someone is having an HD video conference, well, that’s pushing it. But for people with regular web cams, they should get what they need.
As for the rest - file sharing, streaming, etc - they all deserve the same speed. No one has a right to make people have to pay for their right to get good speed.
If they do not have enough bandwidth at a certain time, well, maybe limit everyone’s connection speed a KB/s to allow everyone a good connection. But for cryin’ out loud, don’t single out the file sharers! People streaming media are doing EXACTLY the same thing! The details are just slightly worse!
[quote=Neil Berklett]…service broadcasters who choose not to pay for faster access to Virgin’s subscriber base would end up in “bus lanes”[/quote]
And there you go, ISPs are already threatening to use DPI hardware to blackmail.
Lets see …
I make all my money from my customers who pay me money, and I in turn provide a service for them. So you could say that the consumer is the base of my company.
I have this great idea, lets shove a stick up the customers proverbial ass, and see if they will still pay me money!! Oh wait, my customers don’t like that? What a strange concept …
Time to boycott Virgin Media!
Stand up and be counted citizens of the internet!
It just shows that some ISP’s
are more than happy to sell more bandwidth than they can provide ..
@49
You brought up a point. However, I disagree that those who need real-time connections deserve something else than others. When HD TV or HD video over the internet looms on the horizon, it makes sense for the bandwidth providers to clear out the file-sharers. Streaming certainly needs near real-time connections and there’s probably a lot more money in it than from the file-sharers.
We file-sharers singled out ourselves because we’re causing anywhere between 50% to 80% of the overall traffic. Not because we need fast connections. We don’t need fast connections, actually. We need many peers. That’s the idea of the Bittorrent protocol. What’s the use of a 50 Mbit/s connection, when there are only 20 peers who upload at 1 Mbit/s?
an ISP’s shouldn’t have content; they are only there to serve up a connection to the internet. If they’re fucking your connection to serve some of their own garbage, then it would be a good time to fly the bird and connect with someone else.
Virgin Media is a load of bollocks.
@54
But why not a package suitable just for filesharers? “Somewhat less speed, but we won’t dictate what for or how actively you can use it and it’ll even cost you a little less”. I bet most dedicated sharers rather have a connection they can rely on and not have to worry about being *additionally* capped, than leech/seed some unspecified but definitly limited amount of time at full speed promised by their current package.
What a surprise, my ISP (Karoo) is at the very bottom!
Nice bus lane analogy Berkett, ya nub. They’re there to keep masses of people moving in peak times, (and makes an interesting abstract for encapsulation). Infact sometimes, while i’m sitting there idling itching to get home on a friday night i’m sure the people in the buses passing besides me are flipping me the bird and laughing hysterically at all the extra ‘bandwidth’ they have. The cost of a bus ticket is much less than fuel and servicing… hmm it’s starting to sound preferable actually.
Bus lane? yes please!
@57
Right. Let’s just make sure car drivers don’t cross the line and clog the bus lane. Buses are moving all the time.
“Look, unlimited 20meg broadband, 50meg soon. The only cable isp in the uk. You can go wrong with virgin, and they do NOT shape traffic, unless you download over 3gb between 7pm-9pm, then you are resitricted to 5meg for 10 hours”
On a 20meg connection, you can (and I quite often do) break that limit in approximately 30 mins if using your connection to the full. That’s what I flaming well call traffic shaping!
If virgin cannot offer this service without shaping whenever someone actually has the nerve to use it, they shouldn’t be offering it.
(you haven’t quite got the facts right though, it’s actually 3gb between 4 and 9, and lasts 5 hours)
So when everyone starts paying the big bucks for faster content we’ll all be in the bus lane. Then what?
@60
When Dick Bollocks or whatever his name was is talking about bus lane, he’s probably imagining things. Things like “schedule”, “waiting at the bus stop”, “driver”, “bus ticket”, “surveillance camera”. You’ll never know what people are prepared to do for money. The bus lane as a high volume traffic guarantee in a traffic jam*) is fine with me. He just needs to understand that metaphors don’t work if everybody else has a different picture of a bus lane.
*) I’m confident that’s written down somewhere in the traffic development plans for the inner cities.
ive been on virgin for quite a while and with the exception of their kinda shitty 5pm-9pm shaping they have been very good to me. never had any downtime and have been maxing out my upload speed non-stop for about a year.
“A Load of Bollocks” is a line that can also define his companies venture that involves shuttling people into outerspace.
It was only a matter of time until all this has happened and starts coming around. We know the internet that we currently enjoy wasn’t formed with the corporations ‘interests’ in mind. It was formed around a neutral aspect. Todays corporations, like Virgin, are turning it around to make the internet the way corporate america wants the internet to be, not the way the internet was designed to be. The more these providers want to start toying with traffic the more they need to be held to the fire over what the traffic is. If they are going to play with p2p traffic what are they going to do about other traffic? I think “ad server” traffic is going to get first dibs on everything, and follow down the chain in that route.
I wouldn’t consider anything a monopoly like Virgin has to say, as anything that’s good for neutrality.
@ post 24 - The day i download 3gb from virgin in 3 hours is the day pigs will fly and politicians will tell the truth! NEVER GONNA HAPPEN!
Man, Virgin’s PR department is NOT going to have a good day come Monday.
I actually appreciate this sort of straight talking. Berkett might lose a few customers, but he knows how to maximise profits.
I hate corporate whores, but the worst ones are the ones that claim to care for their customers when they don’t. At least Virgin are saying “If you want such and such, you have to pay for it”. Other companies are guilty of false advertising.
Same shit happening for BELL CANADA and all the other Smaller resellers like Primus and 3Web.
http://www.wellandtribune.ca/ArticleDisplay.aspx?e=981092
This is getting ridiculous, feels like middle east which every move you make is controlled and censored.
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