Virgin media finally revealed details of their traffic management system which they’ve been trialling for the last few months. While it’s no big surprise that it was coming with so many other companies implementing it in some shape or form some of the limits seem a little low.
- Broadband Size: M – download more than 350MB during peak hours (16:00-00:00) and your connection will be throttled to 1MB download, 128kb upload lasting for four hours from when it was implemented
- Broadband Size: L – download more than 750MB during peak hours (16:00-00:00) and your connection will be throttled to 2MB download, 192kb upload lasting for four hours from when it was implemented
- Broadband Size: XL – download more than 3GB during peak hours (16:00-00:00) and your connection will be throttled to 5 MB download, 256kb upload lasting for four hours from when it was implemented
While I’m not against throttling this seems to be a blunt instrument to address the problem. Instead of throttling back torrent and newsgroup ports to a slow speed they are dropping your full connection speed. For those on M & L, those limits are pretty easy to reach. Just one of the podcasts I subscribe to is over 400MB for one file. With some careful management throttling could be avoided but your back to downloading overnight and during the day to keep peak hours free for normal web use, VOIP, gaming etc which can eat into those limits fairly easier.
Put it another way, once 20MB connections are introduced just 21 minutes at full speed would take you over the 3GB limit. Not much, eh? However factor in that after the 21 minutes you are still getting 5MB and it’s not really too bad. It will be frustrating though if your hosting on Live and you pop over your limit, throttling back upload speeds and potentially dropping your friends. Also, does the new connection speed implement seamlessly or is there a drop and re-connect?
I can’t really see me having a problem on XL although I was considering dropping to L once the upgrades were completed. After these changes I’ll be staying where I am.
“Instead of throttling back torrent and newsgroup ports to a slow speed they are dropping your full connection speed.”
I guess the problem here is what happens when people start encrypting such traffic, moving it around different ports (as P2P has been known to do), and other P2P software comes online.
Taking a holistic view of all of a user’s traffic is fairer and doesn’t discriminate.
In the cold light of day I guess your right but with so many bandwidth heavy applications appearing that are legitimate the limits still feel tight.
Its disgusting if you ask me. they shouldn’t upgrade there packages offering higher internet speeds (which just incidently all happened after BT upgraded theirs) if there network and servers cannot handle it. They upgrade can’t handle it and we are the victims. Everybody knows that high bandwith using apps are always going to be about and it may suprise you virgin but not evryone who uses bittorrent downloads copyrighted materials. Do not raise your prices and offer us higher internet if we are going to use it normally and then cap it to the speeds it were before for us using a small amount. Do you advertisments not say unlimitted broadband?