At the start of this week, 3UK implemented traffic shaping on their mobile network.  What this does, in simplistic terms, is prioritise certain data over less welcome traffic.  Although they initially announced it would cover video streaming and P2P File Sharing data, 3UK have now relented, and it only covers P2P File Sharing data.  So, if you are using a 3G connection to download data over a peer-to-peer network (even legitimate files like new Linux OS images) then you may be receiving slower data speeds than before.

The exact details of the bandwidth limits that have been put in place are not known, but this will hopefully ensure there is more bandwidth available to share out evenly amongst all customers.

For information, the video streaming limit was planned to limit each device to be only able to download 1 video stream at a time, although this was not implemented.

Although 3UK have always promoted their internet connection as unrestricted (and, given these types of traffic are still allowed, technically it still is), it will be interesting to see if this deals with the congestion that has been seen in certain areas of the country.  Of course, whilst implementing this, they are continuing to roll out their network changes (see here for information on the London outages); 3UK have confirmed that the London outages are for elder equipment to be swapped out for newer equipment in preparation for the merging of their network with T-Mobile which should happen during 2010, and give both companies access to even greater coverage and provide users with more bandwidth across the whole country.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 17th, 2009 at 1:23 pm and is filed under Gadgets. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.