Damn you Virgin Media

2010-04-02T10:18:00+01:00

I'm unreasonably happy this weekend. We had made the right choice to skip the first and last Maelstroms this year. We still have memories of waking up in snow last year. Instead we are looking forward to a nice relaxing weekend of chilling.

After a bit of tweaking we finally got my radio link working (weird routing through the CISCO). Suddenly we are able to stream iPlayer again something that has been next to impossible on Virgin's ADSL link. Luckily as I happen to write the NMS for the radio link so I can actually see what heavy strain iPlayer puts on the link. It turns out not very much, an actual video stream demands less than 2Mb/s while running. According to the router status the physical link is nearly 6Mbs so I can only assume this is due to downstream congestion and/or bandwidth shaping. Considering the amount I've shelled out to Virgin over the last few months I consider it a bit of a rip-off. I am supposedly a couple of rungs up on the allowed download limits which makes no real difference if I can't physically pull that amount through a squeezed data pipe.

Interestingly the data rate for CoD4:MW2 is only around 40Kb/s which includes the voice chat data. I could play OK on the ADSL link but the radio link does improve the ping times by around 40ms which is nice.

Bandwidth

2008-06-09T21:27:00+01:00

I had suspected it for a while but I've just confirmed it. T-Mobile is altering my web-pages. I suspect in this case it's nothing overly sinister like Phorm but it is still un-announced tampering with web-pages I request from 3rd party servers.

Transparent proxies have existed almost as long as consumer internet. Usually they just cache frequently accessed files (like the Google logo) and pass them to the browser directly rather than pulling it over the expensive backbone network again. Since a lot of the worlds content doesn't change and popular sites are visited by the majority of your customers this can make a significant saving to an ISP's bandwidth costs.

In the case of T-Mobile the proxy is inserting the line:
<script src="http://1.2.3.8/bmi-int-js/bmi.js" language="javascript">
into every web-page that is served. Further more every image displayed is replaced with a link to an image server somewhere on the 1.2.3.* network and a piece of JavaScript that adds the hover text "Shift+R improves the quality of this image. Shift+A improves the quality of all images on this page." which works as advertised. On the limited resources of a mobile wireless connection this probably makes sense although I'm still a little wary of the fact T-Mobile is modifying my web-pages.

It looks like we won't be able to get broadband via the company (landlords not liking holes in walls) so I'm currently hunting round for broadband deals. I'm beginning to worry about some of the things Virgin Media is up to so I don't think cable is a given.

I've also set-up my virtual server firewall so I can run torrents as and when required. Although I pay per GB it's a fairly honest arrangement (the basic plan starts at 100Gb per month) which is a fair amount to get through. Of course I double the bandwidth usage when I pull the final file to my home machine but I'm fairly sure the ISP's cannot inspect the data thanks to ssh. In fact once connected I may set-up a few Tor nodes just to avoid my ISP tracking my every move. It's not that I don't trust them to abuse the data, oh hang on, that's right, I don't trust them....

Alex's Adventures on the Infobahn - bandwidth

Damn you Virgin Media

Bandwidth