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New daytime traffic management
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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.
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"ISPs should stop advertising their products as having ‘unlimited downloads’ when really fair usage policies and traffic management are applied"
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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.
Related article - Fair usage broadband.
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