UK ISP Sky feeds realtime customer bandwidth data to litigous anti-piracy firm
torrentfreak.com
torrentfreak.com
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.
Seems dubious.
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.
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).
It's also a vastly different type of aggregation.
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."
Imagine McDonald's selling data to your insurance provider so they can help determine your rates etc..
It's definitely out of bounds and worth putting up a fuss over.
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.
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.
Would certainly be a fascinating project to MITM and figure out exactly what is being sent.
They don't care about ethics if it gets in the way of making money. That's the beast that is capitalism.
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.
I've got Hyperoptic 150Mbps in one place, and CF 1Gbps in another, both are rock solid (and symmetric upload and download).
I'm now waiting for CF to spread into our area in West London as I've heard good things about them. I hear rumours it may be soon.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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!
(yes latency is important too - just discussing bandwidth here)
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.
They're subject to the same bullshit as other ISPs, but you can mostly opt-out.
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.
Have been a cable customer (originally branded as United Artists, then Telewest, now Virgin Media) since the mid-1990s.
Had cable broadband since 2001 (then branded as Blueyonder).
Been through a lot of speed increases over the years: 0.5, 1, 2, 4, 10, 20, 30, 50, 100, 150, 200, 350, 500, 1000 megabits.
Probably had three faults in that time period that needed a call out to fix.
Unless you can get FTTP, no other ISP can compete with them on speed.
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 used A&A in London a decade ago and they were great, albeit a bit expensive.)
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.
I’ve now got 5 people on 66Mbit.
> 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.
Geez. Feels like game devs have gotten lazy about pruning/compressing resources.
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.
> half of the unused quota from the previous month being added to the next.
https://support.aa.net.uk/Home::1
I currently have 8.7TB left on my quota this month.
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.
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.
[1]: half of the advertised bandwidth
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.
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.
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.
A&A are happy to have you: For a price that reflects their markedly increased costs.
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.
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.
Yes, they're more expensive, but you really do get what you pay for.
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)
It is also a now a broadcaster, creating and producing movies, TV shows etc... so there's another interest in anti-piracy from within.
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.
With no sport on more than three (which goes down to two if you exclude the one weekend Amazon have Premier League rights on Amazon Prime).
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."
"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"
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.
And a large proportion of users who watch TV online already have a VPN for netflix etc.
I'd love to have a source for that. I'd be honestly shocked, surprised even, if it was even as many as 1% total.