Vodafone and Kabel Deutschland throttle after 10 GB per day [Update: Rejected]

Vodafone and Kabel Deutschland are now implementing their plan to throttle download speeds after a daily download volume of 10 GBytes.

Update 22:00: As SpiegelOnline reports, Vodafone Kabel has taken a 180° turn. They are now distancing themselves from the throttling; they no longer want to know anything about the 60 GB limit. The throttling was said to be a pilot project that failed. It seems that the strong reaction online over the past few hours has led to this turnaround.

Original article:

Those who download a lot via P2P or file hosts may now be surprised, especially if they are customers of Vodafone or Kabel Deutschland. Because both companies are starting immediately to drastically reduce download speeds when a limit of 10 GBytes per day is reached. A corresponding clause has been in the contracts since 2012, but both companies have only enforced it so far when a data volume of 60 GBytes per day was exceeded. Now it will apply already at 10 GBytes.

Throttling also possible for MMORPGs

Vodafone’s company spokesperson Thorsten Höpken explains: “We can confirm that we have started the technical implementation in the first regions at the beginning of November and that this will be completed in a few weeks.” They will gradually continue to bring more connections under the new regulation. These will be throttled to 100 KBit/s after 10 GBytes per day, which is only supposed to affect file-sharing services. Downloads will then only be possible at around 12.5 KByte per second.

This could also become problematic for MMORPG fans, as many MMOs rely on P2P – for example, when downloading new and large updates. This also counts and will be affected by the throttling. In addition to peer-to-peer, the typical “one-click hosts” and net news are also affected.

Vodafone explains the measure as follows: “This measure is beneficial for the vast majority of our customers, as the available bandwidth in the network is distributed fairly among all customers for an optimal surfing experience. We want to prevent excessive data consumption by a few users from leading to bottlenecks for the vast majority of other customers.”

So, if you play MMORPGs that rely on P2P and are a customer of Vodafone/Kabel Deutschland, you might face an unpleasant surprise. In games like Star Citizen, one can expect 30 GB patches, 100 GB of game volume. Even The Elder Scrolls Online quickly reaches double-digit GB ranges.

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In a further statement from early Friday morning, Vodafone reassures:

Only file-sharing services based on peer-to-peer (e.g. BitTorrent), Usenet news, or one-click hosting are affected by the regulation.

The vast majority of services are not affected by our regulation. These include internet surfing, video streaming and video-on-demand (e.g. YouTube, Netflix, Twitch, Amazon Prime, media libraries, YouNow), emails, social networks, photo and video sharing, video, audio and text chat, online backup. Commercial providers’ peer-to-peer downloads (e.g. game downloads from Steam, Origin, Blizzard’s Battle.Net or Windows updates) or peer-to-peer based video streaming (e.g. Zattoo or SOPCast) are not affected on the other hand.