I'm surprised it's not made more clear in the article, but it's important to note that as well as being an ISP, Sky are a more traditional subscription TV provider. They have the exclusive rights for most of the Premier League TV on their channels (paying ~ $1.65bn a year for the these rights[0]) - it's probably the main pull to their , so it's very much in their interest to fight off piracy of it.
Something being in their best interest doesn't mean that it's ethical. This is still a gross invasion of privacy. I agree that it is in their best interest, but would argue that their TV and internet services should be split into separate companies so that the company interest and the user interest align.
They aren't doing blockings of individuals here, they are looking at aggregate traffic to certain sites, and literally every ISP on the world does that because they need to optimise their peering arrangements for high traffic, high QoS sites (such as installing OpenCache for Netflix).
The difference between aggregating traffic for the purposes of internal network management, and sending traffic data to a third party is not hard to see.
> The difference between aggregating traffic for the purposes of internal network management, and sending traffic data to a third party is not hard to see.
Is it? If they send it to a third party technical subcontractor for internal network management is that bad? If they publish a chart publicly of the top ten websites our users visit is that bad? (That's very common).
If they pass the data to geofiltering vendors to use for threat intelligence to reduce DDOS attacks is that bad? Fraud?
What exactly is the obvious line here that you think exists, other than "I don't like copyright."
But they're not sending any customer data in this case. It's a list of IPs of servers that are seeing traffic spikes on their network, not IPs of customers connecting to them.
By your logic you'd by fine with your phone provider handing over all call logs and recordings to the govt too along with full browsing history, location data... you know... since they already have the data.
We're not talking about "call logs". Sky is collecting information about where their heavy traffic is going, which as Mindwipe says, is just sensible network management.
Then they share some of that data with 3rd-parties. That's not information about their customers; it's the IP addresses of IPTV servers they've been streaming from.
They could be sharing information about which customers have been streaming from those addresses; but that's not what the article is claiming.
I subscribe to Sky satellite for TV. I get my broadband elsewhere. The Sky box is not susceptible to inspection, and since it integrates online "catchup" services, it might well be using my broadband connection to send home information about my viewing habits.
The Sky box also creates a shadow wifi network, by default. The shadow network uses at least two wifi channels. On the face of it, this is to allow multiple Sky boxes on the same household account to communicate with one-another, share recordings and so on. I'm not keen to have wifi networks I don't control piggy-backing on my ISP connection; and since I only have a single Sky box, I disable toe wifi.
I trust Sky as far as I could throw them, so I have plans to find out what my Sky box is talking to, and firewall it.
> By your logic you'd by fine with your phone provider handing over all call logs and recordings to the govt too along with full browsing history, location data... you know... since they already have the data.
In the UK all phone providers are required to keep all call logs, location data etc for six months to hand over to the government in a variety of circumstances, so that ship sailed a long time ago.
However, that is the most broken comparison I could possibly imagine, so no.
Yep that makes sense. I would also expect BT and their subsidiaries (plus.net, giffgaff, ee, etc) to be involved as BT also off a subscription based BT Sports service.
Got to wonder if simply using a VPN would sort the problem out or if they could make the case in court that the volume of traffic and the time it was downloaded matches the pirate stream.
While a VPN might technically work it doesn't excuse the overstep from Sky. IMO this shouldn't have happened in the first place.
Makes me wonder if we (technically proficient users) are coming at this from the wrong angle. Ads? No problem, adblock. Bittorrent scare letters? No problem, VPN. Tracking? No problem, pihole/firefox/linux/lineageos/whatever.
We are solving these problems at the wrong end and are leaving less-capable users behind.
Exactly. I find it to be rather egotistical that tech people think all the problems can be solved with some clever software. I mean I get it, but if we spent half the time engaging in finding civil solutions I bet we’d get a lot further than browser ad block.
That's sadly the case for most large-scale UK providers, they all have an interest in content. The "convergence" mantra in business circles made that an inevitability ever since the times of AOL-TimeWarner. You can look at Netflix today to see very clearly why nobody wants to remain a "dumb pipe" in the long run, once they get big enough.
Precisely. I would have been shocked if they weren’t doing this. Despite their attempts to diversify their offerings ober the years, their Premier League coverage is the lynchpin of their entire business.
"My mother" is an A&A customer as she lives somewhere where FFTC is the best form of broadband you can get (and I pay the bill -- A&A are amazing and deserve all the praise they get).
Where I live, my partner subscribes to Virgin Media as they're irritatingly the only ones who can provide a ~1 GBit pipe where we live. I just had a look at both of them again, and whilst Virgin offers 1.1 GBit, Zen and A&A offer ~40 MBit. I don't live in London, and as far as I know, there are no other high bandwidth fibre or cable providers in the area.
Do you know why? I know Virgin has its own infrastructure, but it irritates me that BT have been forced to unbundle their services, yet the cable cartel have not.
They really are. Their phones are picked up almost immediately. The person you get to speak to is technically competent. E.g. if you call sales, you often get the head of sales.
A&A target geeks; they provide an IRC channel that is populated with knowledgeable geeks (as well as A&A support people). This is my first port of call for technical issues, because I prefer not to burden their support people if that's avoidable. Also because I think an IRC chat is an easier way of dealing with a technical issue than a phone-call, on the whole.
I was talking to A&A about speeds when I upgraded to FTTP. The upgrade was mostly for reliability -- my FTTC line suffered badly from local interference.
They currently do an 80Mbps down, 20Mbps up service on both fibre-to-the-cabinet (FTTC) and fibre-to-the-premises (FTTP).
When I asked about gigabit (which is available on the BT FTTP platform) - the answer I got gave me the impression they want to make sure their backbone network can deal with that kind of traffic before they launch anything like that.
The other thing they mentioned was that the high-bandwidth services most people use (I guess Netflix and the like) have an upper limit to the data rate -- and it's nowhere near gigabit.
I'm not entirely convinced that the difference between 80Mbps and gigabit would be noticeable on anything but heavily-seeded torrents (e.g. Linux ISOs) or backups being sent to providers with similarly fat pipes. It's a great marketing strapline though, and clearly many customers see the headline "up to a gigabit, only from XYZCo!" and decide based on that.
It does make a difference if you have anyone in your house doing gaming (games are HUGE now), and it makes a big difference for me on work from home.
Especially the difference between A&A’s fastest 160/30 service and Openreach’s 1000/115 - the extra upload is more important than the extra download for me!
edit: A&A’s issue with gigabit at the moment is caused by one of their strengths - A&A make firebrick routers, which are what they run their broadband platform on. It gives them more control and great monitoring. But the higher bandwidth versions aren’t ready yet, so they can’t really sell faster services yet.
> It does make a difference if you have anyone in your house doing gaming (games are HUGE now), and it makes a big difference for me on work from home.
does it?
just checked my router, my WFH VLAN has consumed 21gb down/7.7gb up in the last 64 days
so 2xmonitor fullscreen citrix is using about 300mb down/120mb up per day
and my gaming VLAN used about 20kb/s when playing Overwatch
I doubt you will notice any difference between 160/30 fibre and 1000/115 fibre!
> and my gaming VLAN used about 20kb/s when playing Overwatch
I gather GP was referring more to the /size/ of the games, not the amount of traffic consumed while playing them.
Most of the major AAA games are more than about a hundred gigabytes these days. My installation of Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020 is 153 GB for example.
WfH for me includes pushing content and containers about - 115 up helps a LOT there.
MSFS is actually a bad example, the download servers are wacky at least in the UK - you won't sustain more than about 250mbit. But other titles from services like Steam download in a lot less time - I can max out my line quite happily from Steam - and do with alarming frequency!
Might be worth looking into https://communityfibre.co.uk in London - they are digging up the streets outside my house in East London at the moment. I intend to move from Virgin when they go live here. They already cover other London areas
Another +1 for CF. Been maybe 2 hiccups in the 2 years we've had them. Although we're on an early adopter plan, I think, because we've got 1Gbps for nowhere near the price they're currently quoting.
Andrews and Arnold or IDNET for me. I have a gigabit FTTP service from IDNET (over Openreach FTTP) and it has been very reliable.
edit: it’d be on A&A if they did 1000/115 as an option.
I’d avoid pretty much all of the standard retail ISPs, and especially Virgin Media. VM are very aware they are not part of the normal migration setup for UK broadband, and exploit it to the hilt. Their support sucks, and cancellation is downright abusive.
You must not have much need to upload. I’d struggle with “up to” 3Mbps. I also wouldn’t enjoy downloading a 60GB from Steam with that download speed either.
GTA isn't even that big. MW is 231GB. That would tie up a 20Mbps connection for over 24 hours, which to me is unacceptable when I both work from home and run my own business. The biggest problem, as I said, though, is upload. 3Mbps is basically useless when I need to run off-site backups, videoconference, push files to servers, etc.
> I’ve now got 5 people on 66Mbit.
That's nice for you but that's about 13Mbps each which isn't much less than 20Mbps and they're unlikely to all be using it heavily at the same time, so in reality they probably get more than 20Mbps each.
And as I said, my choice is 20Mbps vs 1Gbps. No 66Mbps option. It's not really a choice at all.
I was also a happy Demon user for some years from the mid-nineties... having your own hostname and IP address (which, weirdly, I can still remember) always felt so luxurious!
I don't think that's entirely fair. I've been a happy Virgin Media customer for well over a decade. I've never had a serious outage and get 350mb internet (which I actually get), a decent selection of TV channels and use of a landline for £50/month.
They're subject to the same bullshit as other ISPs, but you can mostly opt-out.
Virgin are the worst provider there is. Literally I’m typing this now because two of the people I’m on a zoom call with bailed because their virgin connection crapped out.
I'd literally rather chop my own hand off than be with Virgin again. Countless problems, takes over an hour to speak to someone who has absolutely no clue, takes weeks for an engineer to come out, the speeds are never what they are promised.....hated every second with them. Regular provider can't give me the same speeds, sure, but at least their customer service is competent. And when my entire estate had an outage earlier this week I got a mobile router delivered the next day free of charge.
The problem with Virgin is it is very hit and miss depending on area. Some areas are great, but others are overutilised and hit serious congestion at 'peak' times (which is really all day now with everyone WFH). They are upgrading the network though, but it always seems like a bit of a cat and mouse game.
Openreach based FTTC/FTTP doesn't suffer this problem as FTTC is point to point with no cotention, and FTTP technically could but with GPON you're sharing the bandwidth with maybe 32 other people, not hundreds/thousands in your area, so it's far less likely to get hit.
The only ISPs we’ve had persistent VPN problems with for Work from Home for my work have been Virgin and TalkTalk, and TalkTalk was solved with a newer router. VM don’t even admit it’s their issue.
It might be their crappy DNS virgin is running. Had a big issue pulling big repos with git (TLS error) before I switched my DNS. Same with accessing certain websites when I had my vpn on. Ever since I got my eeros so I can set the dns network wide(virgin does not allow custom dns), no problems.
I think a lot of the negative comments here are because Virgin offer non-cable connections for places that don't offer it via OpenReach. (Or they did, I don't know if they still do?) So there's a lot of their customers that are on typically shitty copper connections in a lot of places.
I'm in the same boat as you. NTL, Telewest and Virgin Media. I've never had any serious issues of any kind that weren't of my own making!
I've just moved house and I'm waiting for A&A to connect me up. I've had some issues because BT Wholesale and Openreach disagree on whether or not I can have FTTC. (I can, the previous owners had it).
I've had excellent support so far. It's a breath of fresh air to be able to go to a website, see an email address on it, fire off an email to them, and get a very fast response. None of these god awful web forms whos entire purpose is to try to stop you from actually speaking to a human being.
I've also logged on to IRC and got some help there too.
One memorable time I was chatting to A&A on IRC whilst giving my mother mother-friendly translations and more detailed instructions over the phone. Excellent support, better than I've had professionally. The best part is that if you have a physical problem with the line they pester BT Openreach full time to fix it. Like, the job that you usually do trying to get an ISP to fix a problem. They write very detailed, technical emails to BT internally and copy you in. In my (mother's) case the issue was with someone plugging something in the wrong way around in the exchange.
Yes, they're more expensive, but you really do get what you pay for.
I've got Gigaclear internet - they don't block any of the sites that the high court demand big ISPs do and don't seem to send threatening DMCA letters either. We pay £50pm for symmetrical gigabit and it's great.
I’d love to use Gigaclear since they recently became available in my area. I booked installation twice - no one came either time, and when I contacted Gigaclear I heard nothing.
If you're in London at least, Hyperoptic & G.Network.
Literally don't even filter any of the sites on the high court orders. (I assume because they apply to specific corporations and they fly under the radar for now)
I'll add a +1 for Aquiss also - the last time I lived in the UK they were wonderful to deal with in every respect - the absolute antithesis of any of the "mainstream" ISPs in the UK (or the US).
This is the main reason I'd choose Zen or IDNet instead of A&A if/when I move to an area where I can only get BT/OR. Bandwidth quotas have no place in $currentyear since it costs them basically zero.
They do, but they’re sufficiently high you really shouldn’t hit them unless your traffic pattern is very extreme (the main home option is 5TB/month).
Asymmetric FTTP is because they’re using Openreach’s FTTP platform (like most other ISPs in the UK), and Openreach FTTP is asymmetric.
The fact they don’t offer faster speeds is currently a limitation of their broadband platform (they use in house developed routers), but they’re working on it.
Some people download tremendous amounts of stuff they don't need. This lifestyle is incompatible with A&A quotas (at your big name ISP it's actually costing them more than you pay for the service, but they have so many customers they don't care unless it gets entirely out of hand).
Hear a passing mention that "Bob's Cheese Factory" is good on the podcast you listen to in the shower. Find out there were six seasons, OK, download six seasons of the Bob's Cheese Factory show, equating to 60 hours of video. That evening, watch the first twenty minutes of the pilot, seems kinda flat, delete all sixty hours.
Similar behaviours exist in many aspects of life, there are people who own hundreds of items of clothing they'll never wear, for video games we know an on-line only title will see a staggering number of purchasers who never even go on-line with it once, meaning they paid for it, but they have never played even a few minutes of it, many of us order far more than one reasonable meal per person for take out food.
> quotas [...] at your big name ISP it's actually costing them more than you pay for the service
Apart from one-off costs for building the line and associated repeaters and curb boxes, the only real running costs should be occasional maintenance on those boxes, some electricity costs and most likely some out-sourced phone support ("Have you tried turning it off and on again?").
I'm pretty sure the oh-so-convenient-to-ISPs tale of ever-rising costs if customers go past some arbitrary monthly limit (which is a tiny fraction of the possible monthly usage with the advertised bandwidth) is a MYTH and has been known as such for years.
A little napkin-math:
10⁹ x (1/8 B x 1/2 x 3600s x 8h x 8d) = 10.8 x 10¹² B = 10.8 TB/m = 500Mb/s [1] @ 8h per day for 8 days per month
which is much more than the oh-so-magnanimous 5 TB/month budget I read as an example in a comment further up.
In the UK, most ISPs don't build from the edge out to their own core. Most ISPs use a shared wholesale network provided by Openreach & BT Wholesale (or Openreach & TT Business, or Openreach & Zen Wholesale, etc).
Customer connections over that backhaul are typically billed at a fixed monthly rate for the line itself, and a separate charge which is consolidated between all customers for bandwidth. That bandwidth cost is one of the largest costs for UK fixed line ISPs that aren't building their own infra. Peering/Transit to the internet is very cheap in comparison.
edit: and the ISP we're talking about primarily does not offshore support. It's all in house & provided by technically knowledgable people who don't just have a script - and they're in the UK.
> Customer connections over that backhaul are typically billed at a fixed monthly rate for the line itself, and a separate charge which is consolidated between all customers for bandwidth. That bandwidth cost is one of the largest costs for UK fixed line ISPs that aren't building their own infra. Peering/Transit to the internet is very cheap in comparison.
Okay? So I guess the bottom line here is "A&A and Openreach both have pathetic pricing models". That's still not much of an improvement.
95th percentile is pretty much industry standard charging for B2B connections (although my understanding of how places like openreach charge ISPs is that it's a bit different to normal 95%) - but it does neatly map to 'you use more data, so you cost your ISP more money to serve you'.
The shared wholesale model does have some advantages though - it means that we can have a wide selection of retail ISPs without having the pot luck of living in the right coverage area - there are cheap and cheerful options, and there are premium options aiming at a more niche userbase - it means ISPs can differentiate on what they do after handover, eg better peering/transit, provision of v4/v6 static addressing, better support, etc etc. It means they get country-wide availability basically immediately without the cost of trying to build out to everyone.
FWIW, there are unlimited ISPs in the UK on the same model, but A&A seem to feel that it is not sustainable in their niche of the market.
Because A&A provide the best service. So you would obviously pick A&A since you're the person who constantly moves huge quantities of data over the network and you'll notice your outages or performance degradation more than most people.
A&A are happy to have you: For a price that reflects their markedly increased costs.
> Apart from one-off costs for building the line...
That's where the majority of the cost is. It may appear to be a one-off cost, but it's a capital expenditure that's huge, and such capex is financially equivalent to an ongoing cost of capital (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_capital).
Since individual connections each have some peak bandwidth capacity, that ongoing cost is proportional to peak bandwidth usage. So ISPs need to ensure that they have sufficient capacity at peak time. That's where their costs are.
One way to achieve this is to ignore the problem and effectively throttle customers at that peak time by under-provisioning. Another way is to discourage customers from maxing out their connections over peak times using monthly transfer limits.
It's more the other way around... Sky has been a broadcaster and producer in Europe for a long time, and in the mid 2000s got into the ISP game thanks to local loop unbundling (allowing third parties to use shared telephone infrastructure) in the UK.
Not really surprised. Back in 2015 (when I was still at a telco) we were contacted to sell our DNS resolver logs for "analytics" purposes. They were inordinately interested in getting hold of anything that resembled PII or where they could have a close enough match to advertisement trackers.
Could this mean they "accidentally" block VPN provider servers if enough Sky subscribers stream games over VPN?
Also, streaming live sports in the UK is an absolute garbage fire of different providers each with exclusivity so you'd have to have elevel billion subscriptions to various shitty companies (who still bombard you with ads) to reliably watch sports here.
Some clearly haven't read the article properly. It's not individual customer bandwidth data that's being monitoed and transferred to a 3rd party as inferred, but data on which endpoints are the source of most of that bandwidth usage on the basis they may be pirate IPTV sources, partliularly when they spring up at a similar time to a big event starting.
And it's no big secret, Sky announced to the world they were doing it back in 2018: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hDNw3t-2euU, video described as "A fascinating look at how Sky Broadcasting in the U.K. is using Google Cloud to combat piracy of licensed sports content to defend the rights of copyrighted content owners everywhere and reclaim lost revenue in the process."
So it is individual customer bandwidth, just not ALL individual customer bandwidth. That's only slightly less objectionable. It's also pretty clearly just a correlation, and not proof.
"but data on which endpoints are the source of most of that bandwidth usage on the basis they may be pirate IPTV sources, partliularly when they spring up at a similar time to a big event starting"
Which sounds like a correlation to me. "Source of most that bandwidth...when they spring up at a similar time"
Soeey, a correlation to what exactly? What is looked for is high bandwith on the core network all coming from a single or multiple external sources, not individual users bandwidth.
It's a legal requirement for UK ISPs to block these pirate sites for their customers. The IPs identified are further verified as licensed content abusers before any further action is taken.
I’m not sure how I would update the title but to clarify it’s not all bandwidth data that is shared but rather a list of non customer IPs (along with ports, and bandwidth usage) which are sending data to customers over a given rate.
Note: Not trying to nitpick but I think it’s important to be precise when making these claims.
It appears that instead of monitoring customer IP addresses, Sky is compiling data on which IP addresses subscribers are pulling most data from during (and potentially before) match or event times. Sky then uploads the highest-trafficked IP addresses along with the port the traffic is streamed on to the S3 bucket mentioned above, every five minutes. It is then accessed by the anti-piracy company which, every five minutes, extracts the IP, bandwidth rate, and the port number that bandwidth is on.
At the time of the document’s publication, the Sky ‘Top Talker’ threshold for the Premier League’s ‘RedBeard’ module was 100mbps. The IP address information provided by the ISP that exceeds this limit then appears to be cross-referenced by IP address and port number with data obtained during game week scanning at Friend MTS. It is then processed accordingly.
[0] https://www.sky.com/help/articles/sky-channel-changes