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One of the biggest and most anticipated games of the year, Grand Theft Auto IV, was released last week. From Rockstar Games this is the sequel to the hugely successful Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas and has been released on both Xbox 360 and Playstation 3. Rumoured to have cost around $100m to develop with over 1,000 people working on it at some point it is the most expensive game ever.

• Initial figures suggest it has sold a record breaking 926,000 copies in the first week alone in the UK. That’s somewhere around 5% of all homes in the country.
• Our usage data shows that the day after release had the two busiest ever hours for gaming.
• It looks like a number of people stayed up very late into the morning on Wednesday playing it. Games and releases like this can have big impacts on usage for a short period as lots of people do the same thing at the same time. More…

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The subject of filesharing is one that will run and run. It’s one that elicits emotion and gets people talking. Many many thousands, millions maybe, of people are interested in the subject whether as a file sharer themselves, a copyright holder (or both), an ISP, a legislator or just an outside observer. This subject has people talking and they have many opinions. We posted a couple of months ago about action taken by one software house against people they believed had illegally downloaded and/or uploaded their copyright material and we’ve responded to David Cameron’s call for ISPs to block copyright material. More…

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One topic that is sure to get an emotive reaction is the idea of authorities spying on you. Likewise many people might feel uncomfortable about ISPs monitoring customers’ broadband lines. But there is an increasing call for ISPs to track and monitor more and more.

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We are currently looking at our plans for rolling out and marketing the next generation of broadband products. We’ll be publishing more details on how that’s going to work soon, but for now we want some help.

This request goes out to our customers and to anyone that has an opinion on how the speed of broadband is sold in this country. For the purposes of consistency within this blog I’m going to try and talk about ADSL2+; the underlying technology behind the forthcoming broadband services from BT Wholesale. More…

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Neil Berkett, the new CEO of Virgin Media, has been fanning the flames of the Net neutrality debate.  Interviewed by the Royal Television Society’s Television magazine he put it bluntly: “This net neutrality thing is a load of [censored]”.

In the same interview he attacks net neutrality campaigners and says that Virgin are in the process of signing deals with unnamed content providers. This would prioritise the traffic from these sites to Virgin’s customers and slow down traffic from those providers who don’t pay.

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This post is intended as a short article centred on how we manage the gaming experience for our customers. I’ve focussed on:

• How and why we give priority to gaming traffic on our network.
• How we identify specific games and add new ones to our database.

More…

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It’s been a couple of weeks since we posted the last blog about usage and in particular what’s becoming the “iPlayer effect” so figured an update was probably due now that we have February’s usage data processed.

We’ll stick with a similar format and start with a few headlines. I don’t think this post really needs to be as long as the previous ones, more trying to keep the data up to date and looking the trends.

• Usage in the evening per customer up approximately 16% over the last year
• 18.3% of customers used more than 250MB of streaming last month

• 6.4% of customers used more than 1GB of streaming last month

• 3% of customers used more than 2GB in of streaming last month

• Mean usage for February was 6.49GB, adjusting for the shorter month that’s an increase of 2.9% over January
• 27% growth in streaming overall since January, 25% increase per customer

More…

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As reported by Ireland.com and TorrentFreak Ireland’s largest ISP Eircom is being taken to court by the “big four” record labels (EMI, Sony, Universal and Warner). More…

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The aim of this blog is to cover off some of our plans for traffic management and for the capacity of our broadband network over the next year. We will take a look at some of the factors that influence how our approach to traffic management changes, as well as what governs the amount of capacity that we require. More…

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Since we published the iPlayer Usage Effect blog we’ve been doing a bit more analysis of the usage and reading up on what other people are writing.

As before we’ll have a couple of headlines.

• iPlayer usage is continuing to grow but at a slightly lower rate, up between 10% and 25% per hour comparing last week with the same week in January.

• iPlayer streaming outnumbers downloads by 8 to 1.

• iPlayer usage now accounts for approximately 5% of our network capacity. More…

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