Illegal downloads: which ISP's customers are the worst?

 

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By Barry Collins

Posted on 31 Jul 2008 at 14:34

New research has shown that the customers of just three of Britain's leading ISPs are responsible for more than 60% of illegal downloads.

Internet intelligence firm, Envisional, has been tracking music torrent downloads for the past couple of months, analysing the IP address of those downloading and uploading content and matching it to their ISP.

The company traced more than 28,000 unique IP addresses in June alone and found that 22.6% of them were Carphone Warehouse customers, with 21.6% from Virgin Media and 21.2% from BT.

July's figures are very similar, with Virgin Media customers accounting for 22.8% of the total, BT 21.5% and Carphone Warehouse at 21.4%. Envisional concedes, however, the sampling errors could easily account for any difference between the two sets of data.

The figures show why the Government and the BPI were so keen to strike last week's deal with Britain's six leading ISPs, which included all three of those mentioned above.

The statistics also cast some doubt over the agreement to send hundreds of thousands of letters to customers of the six ISPs, warning those who have been accused of conducting illegal file sharing.

Virgin started sending out letters in June as part of an earlier agreement with the BPI, but it appears to have had no effect on the level of illegal downloads made by its customers.

However, as Envisional's head of piracy intelligence, Dr David Price, told PC Pro, "Virgin only sent out 800-1,000 letters. It was only hitting a small amount of customers."

"The bigger question is whether the mass letter writing we're going to see over the next few months will have an effect," he said.

And Price is in no doubt that the ISPs will have to do more than send out letters to appease the Government and the music industry. "The Government has said you [the ISPs and the music industry] have to come up with an agreement," he said. "If they don't make this deal, the Government's going to legislate something on top of them."