Posted: 24th May, 2007 By: MarkJ
UK ISP
Nildram, despite abandoning a similar method last year (
here), has stealthily reintroduced broadband '
Traffic Management' to its service without directly informing customers.
The
Pipex owned provider formally introduced the restrictions on Monday (21st May) and has offered up an FAQ page to answer any questions -
HERE:
We will be implementing a new form of traffic management profile, which will dynamically adjust the amount of bandwidth available to certain applications based upon a weighting.
This weighting allows us to preference interactive traffic such us HTTP (Web),
VoIP and VPN over non-interactive traffic, such as P2P (peer to peer) and NNTP (Newsgroups). This provides an important quality of service improvement for these applications where delays have a very noticeable effect and we expect that
Nildram customers will see improved performance from these applications.
However, at less busy times, when fewer customers are using interactive applications, the remainder of the allocated bandwidth for interactive traffic can be made available for non-interactive traffic.
The move is likely to concern gamers, with many popular multiplayer titles using P2P style technology (World of Warcraft, STEAM, Company of Heroes etc.) to manage either the multiplayer itself or patch downloads.
Curiously their FAQ page fails to mention precisely what period "
less busy times" are supposed to be. It's consequently unclear whether this is to be a dynamic setting or one based around on/off-peak periods.