Talk Talk and Sky by Broadband

Sky offers movies and sport content to subscribers with a service they call Sky by Broadband (clever name). The downloaded content is DRMed and you can only keep it for 28 days but it’s good quality. The interesting thing is it uses a private peer-to-peer to distribute it.

It’s a smart move by Sky since it saves them lots of bandwidth. I was worried about whether TalkTalk would limit Sky by Broadband. It all depends on their reasons. If they truly have bandwidth problems then they should since it’s quite a large consistent bandwidth hog (since even after downloading it can continue uploading). If they actually just want to limit illegal behaviour with P2P file sharing then they’ll leave it alone since it’s legit.

Well yesterday I left my computer on all day (I wanted to try Orb from work). I didn’t realise that closing the Sky program didn’t actually stop it downloading. When I came home all the movies had downloaded (my bandwidth usage was up to 5 gigabytes for the day). Not only that but my download speed had stayed consistently at about 250 kb/s. Since my router is reporting my connection as 2.2Mbits/s that’s almost full speed. In the middle of the day.

So it seems TalkTalk don’t (yet) limit Sky by Broadband traffic. Of course it would be easy to reach their 40GB a month limit doing that every day…