Virgin Media sets throttle on hardcore hogs Virgin Media's bandwith throttling policy will in future be more targeted towards the minority of customers the firm says "hammer" its network. It said its 50Mbit/s network upgrade programme, now completed, will allow it to restrict bandwidth during peak times for 2 per cent of customers rather than the current 5 per cent. …
I'm gone already. Be Pro may not have 50Mb downstream, but it's sure as hell got nearly 2Mb upstream on my line. And I'd rather have my 13½Mb downstream and actually be able to use it at any time of day, than be faced with constantly fluctuating threats of caps, limits, or throttles with continually changing times when they're in force.
Who needs 50MB down anyway? What are you doing exactly- streaming 1080p hi-def porn? Yes, yes, I know we only needed 640kB of RAM once.
They throttle you whatever at peak times i was watching a down load drop from 256 Kbytes to 128 when i contacted them to discuss there throttling the Customer service guys only answer was in your area you have 2 megs, when i mentoined that i was watching the download speed drop in half during peak hours he again mentoined that i get 2 megs in my area, again i said that i had watch it drop from 256 KBytes a second to 128 he replied with the same sorry answer. Maybe they don't throttle bits only bytes.
I'm not even a heavy user, interweb is about my limit but was downloading a patch for something.
Why not just admit unless your paying for the top package during peak hours they cut your bandwidth.
Has a letter off virgin saying about upgrade from 2mb blah blah blah.
Just goto this page on the letter to agree to it....
Seems like you was agreeing to the speed update and teh slight price increase by clicking on teh link. (and filling in your details)
Oddly enough i have not been charged any more on bill and still on 2mb.
Now wheres that Infinite Modem i have knocking around.....
@ Christopher P. Martin
Just because you can't think of the reasons to have 50Mb, doesn't mean they don't exist. Threats? They're more like warnings - and going from what you've said, they've never been enforced on you. So you probably had nothing to worry about to begin with. I have three heavy users in my household, and my service has never been throttled. What are you doing if you *have* been capped, watching 1080p porn? Grats on moving from fibre, to a less stable ADSL.
@Scott 19
I'm going to assume that because you're "in a 2Mb area" that you were using Virgin's ADSL service. Besides the fact that the speed of ADSL can fluctuate as the result of many different conditions, the speed of your download could've reduced due to conditions related to the server you were downloading from. Don't simply assume every drop in download speed is the result of your ISP fiddling with your line. Although as you're probably someone who knows all of this, I'm going to assume you're not that ignorant and checked your speed elsewhere, and it was Virgin causing the drop. Right?
@Anonymously Deflowered
People who run personal servers from their home line?
I can think of many different reasons for doing so. Games servers? Personal websites? Vent? Teamspeak? Any combination of these?
There's tons of reasons people might want a big upload on their home line for legit reasons. Get over yourself.
@Asam 52
I'm curious, how did you arrive at that number?
"@Adam 52. Your sums are wrong. Please see VM throttling policy for 10Mb package and try again"
2 periods for throttling, in the afternoon and in the evening. Each is defined as a maximum of 5 hours duration. Assume worst case.
14 hours per day @ 10mbps is 61.5 gigabytes
(http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&safe=off&q=14+hours+*+10+megabits+per+second&meta=)
10 hours per day @ 2.5mbps is 11.0 gigabytes
(http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&safe=off&q=%2810+hours+*+2.5+megabits+per+second%29+%2B+%2814+hours+*+10+megabits+per+second%29&meta=)
Total amount: 72.5 gigabytes
http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&safe=off&q=%2810+hours+*+2.5+megabits+per+second%29+%2B+%2814+hours+*+10+megabits+per+second%29&meta=
Turns out adam's numbers were conservative
Im on be pro as well, and have almost 2mb upstream. I work abroad a lot, and the upstream is great for being able to grab files etc I need when Im away. Also, Ive got a slingplayer so I can watch my sky when Im away. 10mbit would make it a lot lot better. All legal and legitimate uses for having a high upstream.
Like most people I download my stuff at night.
If i was to download all day my internet service would be pretty crap for my wife and I.
It's only mad download kidz who really need to fill that new 1TB drive with shit they'll never have enough time to watch who max their connection 24/7 so who cares ?
Got the 10Mbit upgrade recently. It's a massive difference to the previous 2Mbit. Upload speed is also vastly higher than before, where you'd be lucky to get 20KB/s before.
Then again apart from bi-annual "oops, cable internet is down for a few days" problems, Virgin's Cable service has been solid for a good 8 years for me. It's always provided the advertised speeds, and I'm certainly paying a lot less today for it than 8 years ago (£25/m for 600kbps I recall, now I'm paying £21 for 10Mbit and phone).
If only their cable television offering was better. I can't even get iPlayer or 4od working on the box they supply. Guaranteed box crash.
Read their policy again. What you have described is a theoretical maximum download assuming the cap lasts for 5 hours twice a day.
A 10Mbps line is capped after 1.5GB of data is downloaded. Your line is capped at a maximum speed of 25% normal speed for 5 hours. This is during the day. In the evening if you hit 750MB download, you hit the cap again.
A single game download from Steam can easily hit 5-12GB, so you hit this cap in no time at all. Hit the cap too much and you are classed as a high traffic user and get seriously penalised. To be perfectly honest, hitting a 1.5GB isn't difficult with the sizes of game demos these days.
Have the temerity to want to use the service we are paying for at the times correctly identified as those the majority of people would choose to use the service.
Why doesn't VM stop trying to penalise customers for believing the obviously inaccurate marketing lies and maybe, oh I dunno, actually invest in a network capable of supplying the service they keep telling people they offer.
The heavy users are not "abusing" the service, they are "using" it.
The fact the network apparently cannot cope with that is not the users fault - in fact they may want to get the damage they do in writing as a nice legaly presentable document proving VM sold them a lemon of a service knowing that it was not fit for purpose.
And Paris?
Simply because the burkett customer experience reminds me entirely of a certain part of her anatomy.
Herpes and all.
satanswombat
....bollocks.
I'm on the 50Mbit and can safely say that I get STM'ed to the high teeth when I download more than 4GB of data. It goes back after about an hour but they are talking rubbish if they say their 50Mbit product is free from STM.
Oh and I would class as a higher user as most of the time I'm pulling around 20GB a day!
AC coz, well just coz.......
I have virgin media cable broadband/telly/phone on the medium 2Mb service. It looks to me that if I start downloading things at 10 am, I will be over my download limit ( a whopping 1000Mbytes ) by 11:15 am and get throttled to 128kbytes/sec until 3pm. Then I get my full 256kbytes/sec for an hour and a half, then back to 128kbytes/sec until 9pm. During this time I am an evil bandwidth hog clogging up teh bransonfibres.
Or is it the 18kbytes of upstream, which will be throttled to 9 kbytes once i hit the 200Mb limit, which is clogging up teh bransonfibres?
If only i could afford the XXL package I would have twenty times the downstream and six times the upstream and no limits. As a bonus, this would somehow not hog all the bransonbackbone bandwidth and my conscience would be clear.
When people using their internet connection at an enterprise level complain about service. Especially when they are quite clearly paying for a cheap 'n' cheerful residential service.
If you want uncontended, unlimited bandwidth get a leased line! Then you might see why NTL et al get a bit miffed given how much it costs them to pay for your bandwidth (external internet traffic is charged by volume).
It does take the mickey a bit having 10Mbit upstream and 200Mbit downstream trials, when in some areas 2000 premises are sharing 9Mbit (total) upstream.
They should fix their network before trying to dazzle people with pretty headlines and waving their collective willys at BT.
Here at O'Gravel Balloon Face towers we have the 10Mb service (and we do get the full 10). I work from home five days a week using VPN, we listen exclusively to internet radio, the wife uses Citrix Desktop to her university, the phones are on VOIP, and between the six of us we do our share of web browsing. I use iPlayer a fair bit and also run a home web and email server for a bunch of friends. When I'm away I connect in via SSH, and the security camera (well, webcam) uploads images to a web page at regular intervals).
If you can do all that on their cheapest advertised cable service without getting shafted by traffic shaping (never noticed it here) then I'm happy.
A large amount of the 'copper' telephone network in the UK is actually wired up with ALUMINIUM wire and NOT copper, most of which has seen better days ! This makes for noisy lines which is a major factor in slowing down ADSL speeds --- and causing some disconnections.
I was on the cable network years ago, when cable first spooled out in my area. The cable network is FIBRE OPRIC up to the box in the street, from where co-ax takes over to your house. There is nothing wrong with using co-ax over that distance, it is capable of much higher bandwidth than currently being offered.
As for capping, BT will cap you if you as much as try to download something in the evening, so don't you dare try BBC iPlayer !!! I dumped BT for being unreasonable about the level before capping. Virgin's policy on this seems VERY FAIR to me. I can't get cable where I live, so I am with Be who are absolutely FIRST CLASS in every way. There customer service is second to none and they don't do capping. As for downloads, I use a download manager and fetch the stuff during the night when I am asleep --- that way I don't 'hog' bandwidth. BTW, games download at night too, so unless the addiction is extreme, why don't the gammers fetch their huge files at night?
It isn't rocket science ! Greed is a terrible part of society today, as can clearly be seen for some of the above posts. How about some SHARING and CARING, and let's all have a good time and a fair share of the bandwidth ?
They pretty much tell you that they throttle everyone. Here is the maths.
Top 5% of bandwidth users get throttled immediately during throttle hours.
Suddenly OMG, a completely different set of users comprise the "top 5%" because the previous top %5 are now slower. So throttle on to the next 5%. (10% of all users within minutes of opening throttle hours) Ad infinitum until (almost) every user has been in the top 5% during the throttling hours.
Because the throttle is automatically applied for several hours you can see how by throttling "only the top 5% of heaviest users" means everyone in fact. Marketing speak (lies).
Now only the top 0.1% sounds better huh? Well actually it is exactly the same. Just sounds better to users.
Didn't they try to cap everyone to 1GB a week or something some years back, until the backlash stopped them?
I never understand these people who say "Oh need to download 37GB a day at max speed, so they can't stop me!". WTF are you doing with all this stuff? What is it? Trying to run you own Internet mirror service or something? There are only about 5 porn scenarios and a limited number of "actors", so that leaves roughly about 75-100 films worth watching and let's face it, after a while the camera angles all look the same..( ahem ) so I am led to believe.
Music? Films? Only so much you have to time to take it. If you can afford multi-terabyte storage systems at home ( not just 3-4TB NAS like normal people, but 10TB plus ), then you can afford to buy your music and films!!
So WTF are these people doing with this bandwidth then?!
How come the "New" rules that will only penalise we few heavy users, are actually unchanged from 12th of May?
Are here new restrictions I must work around?
My problem is that we're a dual language family, and Russian TV is only available through the internet.
I need a 1Meg line to sustain the IPTV stream, but due to the TM scheme, I actually need to pay for a 20Meg line just to ensure I can sit in the evening and whatch the internet I paid for!
FYI: For a sustained user, the limits are draconian. During the evening download, I can only sustain 7% of my 20 Meg capacity, or face being capped for another 5 hours!
I do not believe I really qualify as a heavy user, just a user who's being ripped off!
Read their policy again. What you have described is a theoretical maximum download assuming the cap lasts for 5 hours twice a day
Yes.
There are 2 periods, each 5 hours long, during which you can get throttled. Throttling lasts for up to 5 hours. Thus, in each period of throttling, you can only be throttled once. Thus, you will be throttled for up to 10 hours a day.
Not seeing where what we're saying differers from what the policy says:
http://allyours.virginmedia.com/html/internet/traffic.html
I use secondlife. Anyone that uses it will know that its a massive bandwidth hog. Because it is full of user created content, it's always downloading something. I can reach the cap in a couple of hours. So tell me exactly why I should be throttled for a legitimate and legal use of my connection ?
If I could switch to another ISP I would do it in a heartbeat, but unfortunately its the fastest service I can get in my area.
what do the smart cookies do when either no BE at their exchange or they have a sucky old long copper line or dare I say it ali line.
BT's service brings a new meaning to lottery, we have ali and we have more than 4 possible different copper densities as well as line length, then you got the variable is the line a dropwire or is it underground.
If I were to go to VM's 10meg service, their current STM throttle speeds on that service exceed my current adsl synch speed, VM are so far ahead of adsl tech they can actually throttle above my synch speed. The average adsl synch speed in the uk is only 4.5mbit, so if you synching higher consider yourself lucky and that is not the norm.
All this considered VM need to upgrade my area, it is one of the analogue no broadband areas. :(
We used to have DSL via BT and someone else (PlusNet?). When things went wrong, lots of finger pointing until someone from BT came round set up to test the line status by looking for dial tone, not DSL-experts at all. And PlusNet was set up to deal with problems before peak "Evening" times, not at all useful for anyone working from home,
With the switch to Virgin Media
* bandwidth is OK, but highly available, which is what I like
* upload speeds could be better
* landline phone service is overcharged, especially on things like 0845 nos. Cheaper to use a mobile phone -which is what we do.
I dont like giving one company a monopoly, but the data rates are OK
"So tell me exactly why I should be throttled for a legitimate and legal use of my connection ?"
because you are using a far greater than average share of a contended resource at a peak time. throttling isn't a "punishment", it's a quick and dirty (and therefore low-ping-impacting) way of trying to ensure everyone gets a fair share.
I used to pay £37 per month for the XL service - 20Mb. I rang upearlier this year and complained, and got £15 per month knocked off that, as they are charging new customers a lower fee. 1st person I spoke to said it could not be done - had to go higher up heirachy and threaten moving before they listened to me.
Worth giving it a go!
Laurie Miles
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