Virgin use a cable modem box that is incredibly easy to tamper with. For 20 quid I can go to any car boot sale in this region and purchase a cable modem hacked to give maximum available bandwidth at all times. I would simply need to provide the guy with my postcode, he then does a few tweaks and flashes the modem. As long as I have a Virgin data service, modem or cable TV, then it's plug and play from there.
As I understand it, when plugged in, it sniffs the network for MAC addresses and spoofs them. Thus my P2P traffic would be logged by the content "protector", the IP looked up on Virgin's records, and some other poor sap get the blame, and the suspension, while my cable modem would be off spoofing someone else's MAC.
I pay for my 20Mb service from Virgin, and it's very good, but it irks me to know the real reason why I only get a 2Mb connection at peak times is the sheer volume of hacked cable modems in use in these parts about which Virgin has done SFA.
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