JoostTeam

With an ever greater amount of video being consumed online, many Internet users are in for a shock. There’s a dirty little secret in the broadband industry: Internet Service Providers (ISPs) don’t have the capacity to deliver the bandwidth that they claim to offer. Unlimited doesn’t always mean unlimited, as many ISPs impose a ‘fair use’ policy which masks a monthly cap. Others employ bandwidth throttling, where under certain circumstances download speeds are reduced significantly. The intent, the ISPs claim, is to stop users who exhibit ‘abnormal’ behavior — industry-speak for accessing illegal peer-to-peer file sharing networks — from degrading the service at the expense of others. Last week, in an article titled ‘Channel 4’s 4oD hamstrung by UK ISPs‘, CNet reported on the problems faced by the UK television channel’s new on-demand video service, which, along with Joost (and a number of other services), uses peer-to-peer technology similar to that used by ‘illegal’ file sharing networks.

The problem is that packet shaping technology can’t easily tell the difference between different kinds of peer-to-peer traffic.

A recent new policy introduced by Virgin Media (previously NTL/Telewest), goes one step further. So for example, customers paying for the top package (approx. $70 per month) will see their download speeds halved — from 10Mb/s to 5Mb/s — after they’ve consumed just 3GB. In the meantime, there’s nothing like the online video revolution to reignite the net neutrality debate.

[via last100]