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Virgin Media trials longer bandwidth throttling

The usual smokescreen and anti-customer propaganda

"only the heaviest five per cent of users will hit the data limits on a given day."

THAT 5% OF CABLE CUSTOMERS IS OVER 180,000 UNIQUE BROADBAND ACCOUNTS PER DAY**

On day 2 there will be another 180,000 customers throttled. And day 3, another 180 thousand.

180,000 homes is a lot of people per day. As usual VM hide behind figures to (try) make what they do seem minor however we know it hits FAR more people day to day than they would like to admit.

Going forward, I've always wondered how long will it take for them to throttle 1 million unique customers. Of course we don't know how many people get throttled on multiple days, however I get the feeling most people aren't being STMed every day. Given 180,000 a day, even assuming a huge 50% repeat rate (simple***), then by day 10 just under 1 million unique accounts would have been throttled.

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** VM stated they have 3,625,700 broadband customers in their 3rd quarter results. If we take 5% of these, that is 181,285 broadband accounts throttled, per day.

*** I couldnt be bothered to work out compound, if i did the number would diminish the longer the time period extended, but even accounting for that, at a 50% compound rate, 1 million accounts throttled should be reached by day 14 - a fortnight.

Virgin Media rubbishes P2P throttling rumours

Oh its the old 'we have no plans' chestnut again

They have no plans to do so, until they do. Just like they had no plans to introduce STM throttling, until they did.

Alex Brown (the VM employee tasked with implementing STM throttling) is on record saying that providing they have only reviewed the options then it is not a plan, so feels that he can say 'there is no plans to do X' when in reality it may have been discussed a great deal already.

"Which was the case while we were reviewing options. Plans are just

that - what we do once a decision has been made." (Quoting Alex Brown, Virginmedia.feedback Newsgroup post 31.5.08 10.44am)

Disingenuous is a good word.

Virgin Media dishes out free bandwidth boost

Punishment

So at the current rate, downloading at 10Meg for less than ELEVEN MINUTES in the evening will get you slapped down to their 1Meg punishment rate for 5 hours.

Yes pop pickers you read that right. They giveth with one hand and taketh away with the other.

The network improvements get full billing but their stealth management is tucked away on a page deep inside the VM site. It's harsh and affects FAR MORE than just the few P2Pers VM would have you believe blight the network.

Voip, Streaming video, Second Life, you name it. Using more than 364kb/s over the peak time (almost one THIRTIETH of the 10Meg pipe) will get you silently punished and YOUR line will be the one that blighted for 5 hours.

VM made the download limits even tighter just before Xmas, here are the new levels.

M - 2mb max for 20 Minutes, then 5 hours at 1Mb

L - 4mb max for 26.6 minutes, then 5 hours at 1Mb

XL - 20mb max for 20.48 minutes, then 5 hours at 5Mb

However the crippler is that when managed, your uprate is set to 128k or 192k. Like me, you might not even need much download, but because throttling is enabled, your pings go sky high crippling the small amount you have got left.

Thats for everyone. No exceptions.