{"id":68478,"date":"2014-09-07T14:51:41","date_gmt":"2014-09-07T12:51:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/mygaming.co.za\/news\/?p=68478"},"modified":"2014-09-07T14:55:34","modified_gmt":"2014-09-07T12:55:34","slug":"internet-providers-to-clamp-down-on-torrenting","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mygaming.co.za\/news\/broadband\/68478-internet-providers-to-clamp-down-on-torrenting","title":{"rendered":"Internet providers to clamp down on torrenting"},"content":{"rendered":"

Telkom recently announced that it would start to enforce its fair use policy (FUP)<\/a> on uncapped ADSL\u00a0subscribers, echoing a similar announcement from Mweb a year ago<\/a>.<\/p>\n

This means that the ISPs would more aggressively police heavy usage on their networks, throttling the speeds heavy users would be able to achieve on their uncapped ADSL account.<\/p>\n

In the wake of the backlash against their decisions, Telkom and Mweb both explained that it was a necessary step to protect their networks and ensure a good user experience for the subscribers who\u00a0don\u2019t use as much capacity.<\/p>\n

Telkom and Mweb are not the only ISPs to say that such steps are necessary.<\/p>\n

Though not all ISPs agree on how to manage traffic on their networks, Afrihost, Web Africa, and Cybersmart (among others) have indicated that they use some kind of shaping and\/or throttling to enforce their FUPs.<\/p>\n

A particular target of these enforcement measures is traffic from the popular peer-to-peer file downloading protocol, BitTorrent.<\/p>\n

\u201cTelkom discourages the use of torrents, and the like, as these create concurrent sessions that can create a bad experience for all customers on the network during busy periods,\u201d a Telkom spokesperson recently told MyBroadband in a statement.<\/p>\n

While BitTorrents are \u201cdiscouraged\u201d, Telkom added that it encourages other demanding protocols such as gaming and video streaming.<\/p>\n

\u201cMost torrent use is actually illegal in the sense that content is downloaded from sites without paying the requisite license fees,\u201d Telkom continued.<\/p>\n

Afrihost CEO Gian Visser said he also believes that media streaming and online gaming will continue to grow in popularity, and will remain a good way for uncapped users to get great value from their ADSL subscriptions.<\/p>\n

However, he warned that downloading over file-sharing protocols such as BitTorrent would become more and more restricted.<\/p>\n

\u201cEspecially with anti-piracy movements in South Africa and overseas,\u201d Visser said.<\/p>\n

Article courtesy of MyBroadband<\/em><\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

More gaming news<\/h3>\n

Digital PC games dominate the sales charts<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

Lacrosse game creator wants to take on EA\u2019s Fifa<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

This week\u2019s epic video roundup<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

For those of you downloading *cough* Linux and other legal torrent files, you may want to read your ISP’s FUP<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":163,"featured_media":68480,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8812],"tags":[2873,2289,2439,287,10012],"class_list":["post-68478","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-broadband","tag-adsl-isp","tag-afrihost","tag-bittorrent","tag-telkom","tag-torrent"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mygaming.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/68478","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mygaming.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mygaming.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mygaming.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/163"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mygaming.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=68478"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/mygaming.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/68478\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":68482,"href":"https:\/\/mygaming.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/68478\/revisions\/68482"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mygaming.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/68480"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mygaming.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=68478"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mygaming.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=68478"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mygaming.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=68478"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}