Virgin To Cut Heavy Downloaders Speeds

Originally Posted by Digital Spy

Virgin Media has confirmed that it will rollout a traffic management system designed to reduce the downstream speed of customers who download lots of data during peak hours.

The cableco defines peak as between 4pm and midnight, and claimed that only the top 5% of downloaders on each speed tier would be affected. Customers on tier M who download over 350MB during peak will have their downstream speed reduced to 1Mbps and their upstream restricted to 128Kbps for four hours. Customers on tier L who download over 750MB during peak will have their downstream reduced to 2Mbps and their upstream restricted to 192Kbps. Customers on Virgin's flagship XL service who download over 3GB during peak will be restricted to 5Mbps down/256Kbps up.

The traffic management system is being implemented at the same time as 20Mbps downstream services are being rolled out to XL tier subscribers.

So why the fook roll out a 20Mbps service if the network can't handle the current 10Mbps service??

Its a numbers game, and once again Virgin Media are ripping customers off. Unlimited should mean exactly that, unlimited.

Digital Spy Report

As you say a numbers game.
Shame as Old NTL never restricted, Welcome to Virgin and the Numbers game.

They are only restricting speed, not amounts.

They all have a clause which states up to speeds.

Some customers do get very high download speeds, but the conditions must be perfect - and generally fitted to new houses with full, new installations.

Originally Posted by Mark

As you say a numbers game.
Shame as Old NTL never restricted, Welcome to Virgin and the Numbers game.

Indeed

Stuy mate, restricting downloads speeds in turn restricts the amount someone can download, and the unlimited service should mean exactly that, unlimited. It cant be unlimited if because you go over a certain amount you have a restiction placed on the service.

Forgot to add Stuy, the "up to" argument only really applies to DSL as its rate adaptive dependent upon the distance from the exchange and quality of the line. DOCSIS, euroDOCSIS and DAVIC cable technology all allow users to get very near to their quoted speeds no matter how far away from the UBR they are. The only reason why they get "very" slightly lower then their quoted speeds is due to some network overheads rather then distance and line quality, which is normal for all types of LAN connections.

One major downfall of these cable technologies (okay DOCSIS 3.0 is starting to address this, but the UK is still living in the dark ages on 1.1) is the upload speeds are lower, and it only takes a couple of users on the same UBR uploading at full whack to hammer everyone else on that UBR's download speeds.