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Daytime slow-down for heaviest Virgin Media downloaders
Garnet Roach garnet@consumerchoices.co.uk
Virgin Media has doubled the amount of time that heavy downloaders will have their broadband connection throttled as part of its new traffic management policy (30-05-08).
As well as reducing the connection speed of customers downloading during peak hours, Virgin Media (www.VirginMedia.com) will now begin to restrict downloading between 10am and 3pm.
Despite still advertising its packages as “unlimited”, customers who reach their new daytime limits will have their connections cut by up to 75 per cent for five hours.
| "ISPs should stop advertising their products as having ‘unlimited downloads’ when really fair usage policies and traffic management are applied" |
Then in the evening - between the hours of 4pm and 9pm - customers face a second threshold that could again see their connections reduced for five hours.
M package customers now have a daytime limit of 1,000MB - just under 1GB - before their broadband is cut from up to 2Mb to 1Mb for five hours and an evening threshold of just 500MB.
L package customers - who normally have a speed of up to 4Mb (10Mb in areas that have already undergone a free upgrade) - and XL customers will both have their connections cut by 75 per cent if they exceed new daytime limits of 2,400MB (2.3GB) and 6,000MB (5.8GB) respectively.
Evening limits are set at 1,200MB (1.1GB) for L customers and 3,000MB (2.9GB) for XL customers.
Virgin Media said that it was writing to some customers to inform them of the new rules, adding that its daytime traffic management would “have an impact on just 1 per cent of our customers”, and that overall, “the policies only affect the top 5 per cent of users on a daily basis”.
A spokesperson said: "A small percentage of our customers are using up more than their fair share of network resources which affects the service other customers receive. Our goal is to ensure the majority of customers receive the quality of service they expect from our fibre-optic broadband, therefore we traffic manage the heaviest users at certain times of the day to manage this demand."
However, Michael Phillips, BroadbandChoices.co.uk product director, said: “In an age of the BBC iPlayer and mass adoption of peer-to-peer downloading, ISPs should stop advertising their products as having ‘unlimited downloads’ when really fair usage policies and traffic management are applied.
“The majority of users do not understand these policies, and that makes them misleading. Instead, ISPs should have clear charging mechanisms that help customers understand their usage and keep connections as close to their advertised speed as possible,” he concluded.
Comments
The problem is that this utter rubbish advertising they do "Fastest, Unlimited Broadband" manages to catch millions of customers to sign up, and they cant cope with the amount of internet users. But they still keep attracting more and more customers with their bullshit adverts. "Unlimited" my ass! - Nov 5 2008 7:46PM
"from 4pm to midnight from Monday to Friday, and 10am to midnight on Saturday and Sunday your broadband service will be 80Kbps."
No use at all. No warning. Just suffer.
This week I also took the necessary steps to switch to Be Un Limited, only 10 or 11 days to go.
Surely they must be better? Either way, I'm done with virgin.
I've been with virgin.net since they first started as a dial up provider and they were good. The support is now worthless, they refuse to answer most of my questions, preferring to keep dictating their policies to me. Branson - look what they've done to your baby.
Colin - UK - Oct 10 2008 - 20:00PM - Oct 10 2008 8:02PM
try playing an online shooter,
if you got a game with a performance graph you will see it giving regular spikes right across the graph,
slow and jerky as hell online playing for long periods in the game, then can disappear, then come back again,
never used to have this before gordon money grabbing brown went to see branson about ways to thieve more of our money and spying on our internet packets,
worse now than before virgin supposedly upped the bandwidth to ten meg,
seems whatever you do in this country brown will screw you up. - Sep 22 2008 1:00AM
Yes, because of my circumstances, I do tend to be quite a heavy use. What can I do? For the convenience of a truly "Uncapped" connection, I do not mind paying. - Jul 9 2008 10:24AM
With the availability of BBC i-player, 4oD and other providers of higher quality media surely it is the responsibility of the internet provider to make sure it can cope with the increase in demand. This is why more bandwidth is useful and why people subscribe to higher bandwidth packages. If they are selling someone a 4Mb plus package for just sending email and browsing the internet then surely this is overkill. OK, they can receive bigger and better quality flash media adverts – extra content that people don’t want? Should they be penalised for this as well?
As an L package user I am annoyed about the changes Virgin Media are making. I am not being provided with what I originally signed up for and am being penalised for knowing how to use the internet and using it more fully! I expect much better from Virgin since they are in the business of delivering media. More info here: http://www.virginmedia.com/traffic - Jun 13 2008 7:32PM