Stop Virgin capping the internet and profiling my every move.
My current ISP (Virgin Media) seems to be systematically trying to eradicate it’s customer base - by spying on them with Phorm, and now capping their bandwidth to high-bandwidth websites.
If you’re a customer of Virgin Media, BT or TalkTalk, please read this entire post, especially the parts about Phorm
Despite the fact that I pay a fairly high monthly charge (compared to most other UK ISPs) for my internet service, Virgin are announcing plans to cap the available bandwidth from their customers to some high-bandwidth websites. Unless those websites pay for the Privilege of serving VM’s customers unhindered.
Unfortunately the cost of changing ISP is quite high, as I’ll have to get the old BT line reactivated, and replace my wireless router too (I won’t be using BT as my ISP, and they are also planning a Phorm implementation) - but if it’s a choice between spending that money up-front, then paying less monthly (admittedly for a slower service) , or staying with an ISP that wants to profile every move I make on the web (and in any app which uses “the web” in the background, say, iTunes for example) for serving me targeted advertising revenue, and limit the bandwidth available to the kind of services which are designed to be used over broadband, I know what I’m going to do.
Back to Phorm…
I know the “official line” on Phorm is that it’s an anti-spyware/phishing type service - but I don’t need one of those from my ISP - and I’m certainly not willing to let VM profile my entire use of the internet when I alerady have an anti-spyware tool installed on my PC, which I have control over.
The way I see it - I pay VM for my phone and internet use - they are welcome to track what number I call (they need to in order to bill me), and which website I visit (again, I know this will happen in logs on the servers anyway - but the data isn’t used for anything) - they are not welcome to process that information (and the content of the pages I view/phone calls I make) to establish what I’m actually reading, and use sell that data for advertising.
Imagine if they did the same on the phone service - they’d listen on every phone call you make, and you’d get telemarketing calls like “You’ve been talking to your family on the phone about buying a new car from X- so we’d like to invite you to make an appointment to visit a Y dealership for a test drive of our new vehicle”.
What VM (and the other Phorm ISP partners) are proposing is to do exactly that with your web browsing activity. Listen in on you web browsing, and serve adverts targeted with that data in mind.
The bottom line is that if you’re a VM customer (or BT, or TalkTalk), you need to be aware of what they’re planning to do, and make a decision whether you want to stay with an ISP who wants to track your every move so they can serve targeted adverts to you based on websites you visit, and then cap your usage of high-bandwidth services.
There is a petition on the Prime Minister website about this - if you’re at all concerned about this, sign it.
Year in Review
Filed under: Articles and Essays, Early Christmas, General, Virgin Media / NTL
After 9Â months or so of looking at Christmas merchandise in the shops, I think it’s now time to say “Happy Christmas” (replace Christmas with your choice of winter holiday if it’s not applicable to you).
So, the year in review… Read more
Broadband and the BBC
Well, here we go… it was only a matter of time really before the UK’s Internet Service Providers (ISPs) got all het up over the BBC’s new, legal, peer-to-peer video download service.
It seems that ISPs are objecting to the amounts of data this service will require, and that they’ll have to provide the peak-capacity that their customers have been paying for. Now, if I’m paying for a 4, 8 or 20Mb/sec broadband service, I expect to be able to use services which are going to use that speed to deliver content quickly enough to play “streaming”. Of course, I know about such terms as “user contention” - and that home broadband is provided on a shared-bandwidth principle - ISP’s don’t actually buy enough bandwidth to give every user the full bandwidth they’re paying for all the time. If they did, broadband would be far more expensive, ISP’s work on the basis that not everyone who has (say) a 2Mb/sec connection on a particular exchange/head will use all that capacity continuously. The BBC player however will likely increase the amount of bandwidth they need to provide the service the customer is paying for.
Virgin Media (the ISP I currently use, not through choice, but because I live too far from the exchange for ADSL to be worth buying into) have “peak time, fair use” caps, so if you download too much between 4pm and midnight, you can expect your speed to drop. They suggest if you want to download large files that you schedule them to download off-peak (for example, in the early hours of the morning). While this is fine for Linux ISO Installation images, it is unfortunately not so appropraite for streaming video, as those “peak times” are exactly the times when people are likely to want to use the iPlayer…
Now, I know other TV stations in the UK have had their players on-stream for a while, but I suspect the BBC’s will garner quite a bit more interest from the public… being free and all…
(full story on Wired)
NTL in appointment keeping shocker…
Yup, they finally picked my defunct TV box up today.
Although they wouldn’t have done if I’d not spent another 45 minutes on the phone to them yesterday to remind them (as they’d “lost” my booking again…)
Now I eagerly await the next mistake (which I’m guessing will be on my next bill…)
NTL/Virgin - they did it again…
another day, another phone call, another screw-up…
Today’s call to NTL/Virgin Media to find out what happened on Saturday revealed that my TV Box had been reconnected (again) rather than being picked up. I’ve rescheduled the pickup (again) and have had to go through the whole “disconnections” process again - so hopefully, this time, they’ll get it right.
I don’t hold out much hope that they will…
Anyone know how I go about finding out if the BT line to the house can be reactivated, and what broadband speeds I could expect over ADSL?
Another NTL/Virgin screwup…
Well, it’s about time they screwed up again (it’s been a while since the last few screw ups - see here, here, here) - today they were supposed to come and collect the box they were supposed to have switched off back when the whole “Sky thing” happened - of course, they didn’t, they just put a credit on my account equal to the cost of the TV service.
No doubt this is how they’ve been claiming very few customers have left over the Sky channels fiasco - customers who’ve asked for partial disconnections (I’m keeping the phone and net with them) haven’t been disconnected at all.
Anyway, today they were supposed to come and get the TV box (between 8am and 1pm) - of course, they didn’t turn up - no phone call, nothing.
At around 3:30pm, I spent about an hour all told on the phone trying to get through to someone who had a working computer on his/her desk and was able to answer the question “where is the engineer who is coming to get my box? - he should have been here hours ago”.
Needless to say, I failed dismally. Even if the poor guy in the call centre’s PC was working, he couldn’t get any details of engineer appoinments for the day, so I was left having wasted the entire day waiting around with no information as to when the engineer would actually bother showing up.
If ADSL was available here at a decent speed, I wouldn’t have to continue dealing with the utterly useless NTL/Virgin Media.
Another Cable Update
Well, it’s being reported by the Guardian newspaper that there is no hope for Cable customers who like shows like 24, Battlestar Galactica and Lost.
A Sky spokesman insisted Sky had not “pulled” its channels.
“We have an agreement that Virgin Media can distribute those channels until the end of the month,” he said.
“Virgin cannot distribute from March 1 if there is no agreement so, sadly for our customers, those channels would not be available.”
I’m glad my Sky dish will be installed the day before I lose Sky One, Two, Sky News and Sky Sports News from my cable lineup. However I don’t think it’s encouraging competition or consumer choice for these two companies not to reach an agreement for the benefit of their paying customers. I have no doubt Sky losing several million cable viewers will have an effect on their advertising revenues - at least until the Cable customers who will move to Sky do so. Cable has a decent channel line-up even without the Sky channels, but there are enough shows I enjoy watching that I’ll make the move.
Plus if in the future I want to get HDTV, Sky’s platform currently has a much wider range of programming available…
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