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Once upon a time, music and movies were given away free of charge on TV and radio. The only ‘payment’ you had to make, was to wait for the TV or radio station to decide that it wanted to play the track/movie you wanted. Then along came Napster & Co and the rest is history. Those criminals who want to access torrents will no longer be allowed to do so by Sky. KitGuru does a (legal) search for more info.
A ruling handed down by the courts means that access to torrents is being cut off. So far, only the major ISPs are being targeted it seems – starting with Virgin but now Sky has also agreed to ‘no more downloads’.
With other companies set to follow suit in the coming months, this will no doubt cause a major headache for the ISP’s marketing teams.
If customers are not trying to download 1GB films from torrent sites, if all they want to do is access email and Facebook, then you can do that on a 3G connection on a phone (which is around 200Kbps in many cases) so no one needs more than a 512kb connection, right?
Virgin’s ‘Mother****** of all broadband’ advertising seemed squarely aimed at those who needed 50Mbps in order to get large files faster. If you’re a serious business user, then you’re not using a Virgin home service, so any argument about “Ah yes, but some companies might need it” will disappear.
In a dark room with ‘no cameras allowed’, we asked an expert “How much bandwidth do you need in order to watch high quality TV etc?” and were told that “Lesser channels on Sky can get away with half a meg, but important, popular channels need 1 to 2 megabits per second”.
Interesting.
We pushed on and asked about Sky’s famous HD offerings. “No more than 4Mbps” we were told. So, on that basis, you could get all the access you need from a 10Mbps connection.
The first part of the broadband revolution was the move from 56Kbps fax modem cards to speeds measure in the ‘sub 1Mbps' range.
We're now in the second phase of the revolution, where ‘serious networks have been invested in' and ISPs have ‘more bandwidth than oceans have waves'. This 2nd phase has been driven by enthusiasts – by people who knew that Doom9 was not a game as much as the place you go to for CODECs and the like.
The 3rd phase of broadband will bring scary data rates, but how do you market that bandwidth without people needing >1GB files?
KitGuru says: It's a serious headache for the marketing folk at Sky and elsewhere – and one that needs to be solved soon. If the ISPs get it wrong, then they will have the ‘network to end all networks', but no requirement for all those data packets (think ‘Sony, standing there with a warehouse full of Blu-Ray content that no one wants to buy, because it's overpriced and slow to market'). Gigabit to the door will be with us very soon – and labs across the world are already considering “What challenges will we face when scaling up from 1Gbps to 56Gbps to 400Gbps'. Data transfer rates in the gigabit range is serious stuff. So where's the instant/affordable content coming from ?
Comment below or in the KitGuru forums.
Interesting points, I find it funny that ISPs never send you confirmation of bandwith used during the month. I think most people would be shocked to see that they use only a quarter of what they pay for.
This seems to be the only article written on Sky blocking torrents. The Pirate bay is not “torrents”. If torrents were to be blocked, which would be nigh on impossible, there would be widespread outrage as various games which use torrents or p2p networks to send out updates would stop working and all the other legally availible torrents would be out of reach. Torrents are a portion of the internet and without being given access to them the ISP in question would be seen as not giving a full service.
This article is absurd and sounds as if it was written by a 12 year old.
“In a dark room with ‘no cameras allowed’, we asked an expert “How much bandwidth do you need in order to watch high quality TV etc?” ”
Really? Really? You couldn’t work that out yourself?
““Crappy channels on Sky can get away with half a meg, but decent channels need 1 to 2 megabits per second”.”
WHAT?! So the quality of the programmes suddenly change how much bandwidth is needed?
“If the ISPs get it wrong, then they will be ‘Sony, standing there with a warehouse full of Blu-Ray content that no one wants to buy’”
Are you even aware of how anything works? How would Bluray discs go unsold because of torrent blocking, what on earth is running through your mind?
This ridiculous and unconfirmed article is just trying to stir up trouble and get people angry over nothing but ill conceived notions of what may happen. I seriously hope you were not paid for this utter nonsense.
unconfirmed article? Since when does an industry source go around confirming news on a tech site? lol.
Its interesting because some of the lesser channels on sky (or crap as the author refers to) get a bandwidth cap, so you can see pixelation and artificating on them from time to time.
Sky 1 and the like are clearly getting more bandwidth as they look sharper and have better colour satuation. its a problem for sky being beamed over the air, as they are limited to 720p. Virgin media cable can easily support 1080p or more, but they are linked into buying from sky so they are f*cked from the start.
I use Netflix at home and the author has a point. some of the movies are ALMOST as good as my bluray discs. as it will scale the quality from low SD to XHIGH HD if the connection can keep up. its a clever system which works really well.
Ive found myself buying less blurays over the last 3 months and spending the £4.99 a month for netflix unlimited streaming over wifi.