How UK's TalkTalk is Ruining OnLive for its Customers

Last week OnLive launched in the United Kingdom, and though it may have had a hiccup here and there when it launched, the service mostly went off without a hitch. But customers of ISP TalkTalk noticed that they were having a lot of trouble connecting with the service during peak evening hours - according to a TorrentFreak report. At first customers thought this was on OnLive's end, but a little bit of digging found that TalkTalk had been throttling connections because the OnLive data traffic was being misread as P2P file-sharing traffic.

Most of the problems TalkTalk users experienced with OnLive occurred during the peak hours between 6 PM and 12 AM. Besides throttling connections, TalkTalk's application to deal with P2P traffic is also cutting customers off from the service completely.

When it comes to P2P traffic, TalkTalk is not shy about how it manages such traffic: it does whatever it can to curtail it during peak hours. TorrentFreak also points out that because OnLive uses UDP connections to transfer game data, TalkTalk’s traffic shaping equipment is likely mistaking it for P2P traffic.

“This has been raised with our network team and we are currently investigating,” a TalkTalk spokesperson told TorrentFreak when asked about the OnLive problems.

Customers of the ISP feel like they are being ignored and that their subscription to OnLive is being wasted:

“I basically feel that my money spent on OnLive is being wasted. Working from 8:00 till 16.30 I have no use for this service as I would have wait until midnight to have access. Which is unrealistic, people need to have a good sleep, right?” OnLive user and TalkTalk subscriber Dawid told TorrentFreak.

Opponents of data throttling have yet another reason to point out why the practice is questionable: it can discriminate against data related to valid and legal activities..

Source: TorrentFreak