Categories
Business piracy Regs surveillance & privacy

Sky blocks Newsbin2 too @edvaizey #deact #Chumbawumba, #MichaelJackson #JarvisCocker #Adele

I note that further to the court order presented to BT to block file sharing promoter Newsbin2 Sky is now also doing so. I have covered this a fair bit of late here here and here .

It is anticipated that all major consumer ISPs will get the same court order. It would be useful to measure the effectiveness of this activity. It will also be interesting to see whether Newsbin2 clones/mirrors will surface as  was the case with Wikileaks and Pirate Bay although to my knowledge Newsbin2 is only being blocked in the UK (happy to be corrected here). Furthermore it will be useful to see how much growth there is in encrypted traffic out of the UK following these court orders.

Newsbin2 is itself a phoenixed version of Newsbin.

Coincidentally in the House of Commons

Categories
Business Cloud internet net neutrality Regs

Netflix, Comcast, Level 3 and Net Neutrality #deappg @edvaizey

The Net Neutrality debate in full swing: Comcast wants to charge Level 3 for the delivery of the Netflix content over its network because such content represents a disproportionately high amount of traffic. What gives?

There’s a very interesting row going on over the pond concerning who pays for network access that has a useful contribution to the Net Neutrality debate in the UK. I am a late arrival here but it is certainly worth recording.

In a nutshell US video streaming provider Netflix recently awarded its content delivery contract to global network operator Level 3. A great many of Netflix customers use Comcast as their ISP. Comcast and Level 3 have a peering agreement whereby they carry each other’s traffic free of charge.

Comcast now wants to charge Level 3 for the delivery of the content over its network because Netflix represents a disproportionately high amount of traffic.

Level 3 is trying to get the US Authorities involved with a Net Neutrality angle. Comcast does have a fair point to make because the Level3/Netflix traffic amounts to 27 x 10Gbit network ports – 2 times its existing traffic levels and 5 x the level of traffic that Comcast sends to Level 3.

This is a beauty and mirrors public conversations going on in the UK including Ed Vaizey’s recent announcement that ISPs should be left to sort out their own commercial arrangements for content delivery – an announcement that subsequently with retrospective caveats (clarifications?!) by the Minister.

I’m not going to provide any links to other sources here – a Google search for “netflix level 3” yields 585,000 results. This could provide us with a precedent that will influence other commercial discussions and, no doubt public debate in the UK.

Categories
broadband Business internet Regs

@tom_watson @andrewpercy Questions to @edvaizey on Broadband Miscellany #finalthirdfirst #digitalbritain #FTTP

It’s Friday afternoon and the first time this week I have been able to sit down and blog, this time about broadband miscellany. It could be a full time activity if I had the time as so much stuff passes my way.

I note that Minister for Communications Ed Vaizey has been demonstrating his politcal sidestepping skills by answering MP Tom Watson’s request for a definition of “super fast broadband” with:

“Super fast broadband means broadband of sufficient speed and quality to deliver the services that will lead to Britain having the best broadband network in Europe. The technology used to deliver this could be fixed or wireless but will represent a significant upgrade on today’s fixed and wireless networks.”