Virgin Media throttling 10Mbs down to 0.5Mbs

amano

I have the 10Mbs connection at present and am a reasonably heavy user so tend to spend most of my day throttled to what I thought was 2.5Mbs. Indeed when I go to any of the speed test sites then I get a reading of about 2.3Mbs. However I have spent the afternoon experimenting with a number of different streaming applications including p2p apps and non p2p apps and I cannot get any of them to download at more than 0.5 MBs. Worse than this, if I max out the 0.5MBs in one app then I am unable to simultaneously browse web sites in a browser.

I would be interested to know if others are experiencing the same level of throttling?

Note that if you are downloading at 10Mbps you hit the 1200MB limit after 16 minutes, so I think that Virgin should at least be honest and rename their 10Mbps as "10Mbps for 16 minutes a day."

normanmark

Just download in the off peak hours they set?

DatabaseError

I'm not with VM (non cable area) but I thought the shaping was common knowledge?

artha

amano wrote: »

I have the 10Mbs connection at present and am a reasonably heavy user so tend to spend most of my day throttled to what I thought was 2.5Mbs. Indeed when I go to any of the speed test sites then I get a reading of about 2.3Mbs. However I have spent the afternoon experimenting with a number of different streaming applications including p2p apps and non p2p apps and I cannot get any of them to download at more than 0.5 MBs. Worse than this, if I max out the 0.5MBs in one app then I am unable to simultaneously browse web sites in a browser.

I would be interested to know if others are experiencing the same level of throttling?

Note that if you are downloading at 10Mbps you hit the 1200MB limit after 16 minutes, so I think that Virgin should at least be honest and rename their 10Mbps as "10Mbps for 16 minutes a day."

Sorry for appearing simple but can someone explain this post for me? What is throttling? I thought that if you had a VM BB connection you got up to the speed stated 24/7 regardless of how much you used the service?

prowla

artha wrote: »

Sorry for appearing simple but can someone explain this post for me? What is throttling? I thought that if you had a VM BB connection you got up to the speed stated 24/7 regardless of how much you used the service?

It depends what the details in the T&Cs say. For instance, if they say "up to", then it could be anything, and if they mention a "fair use" policy then they can control the speeds however they like.

vale46_2

virgin have got terrible since there new stm last year they have restrictions in place from 10am till 9pm i use bitmeter2 to check my usage to stay within there rules
virgin stm = http://www.virginmedia.com/help/traffic-management.php
on 10Mbs you will be hit with a 75% restriction at least
but its bad restricted 50% to 75% (they say) for 5 hrs is rubbish when u break one of there limits

soul619

vale46 wrote: »

virgin have got terrible since there new stm last year they have restrictions in place from 10am till 9pm i use bitmeter2 to check my usage to stay within there rules
virgin stm = http://www.virginmedia.com/help/traffic-management.php
on 10Mbs you will be hit with a 75% restriction at least
but its bad restricted 50% to 75% (they say) for 5 hrs is rubbish when u break one of there limits

after leaving my computer downloading during the day one day i got restriceted for a whole week! when i called them to tell them this they said i was lieing! it took a month for my ping to re-settle an they didnt even no what a ping was!

Woby_Tide

aren't Virgin planning to increase their traffic management over the enxt few months too? ho wlow can they throttle....

Patrick20

Virgin have been doing this to me for months. My sufficient 2Meg broadband is now having trouble downloading websites in my browser never mind any music from itunes etc. A 7Mb piece of software took 1 hour to download yesterday. !!!!ing disgusting tactics!!!

newbie2linux

Hi,

Was completely unaware of the fact that Virgin Media have a policy whereby they throttle download speeds on accounts that they deem are being used to download large amounts of data.

Rarely get in excess of 1Mbps on an upto 8Mbps account (BT customer not cable) and played around with iPlayer a little the latter end of last week. Watched three in all episodes of Top Gear and now find that Virgin Media have limited download speeds to 80kbps marginally better than dial-up.

Not at all happy particularly with the fact that I've been unplugging ADSL line filters thinking that one or more of them have gone faulty, hooking up a replacement ADSL Modem Router, disconnecting all of my sockets, ringing Virgin Media on two seperate occasions after having been in a queueing system for what seemed to be ages to find that they should be fully aware of what is going on (they did not suggest that my account was being throttled only agreed that there was a fault on my line).

Really does make 'unlimited' sound an absolute farse. Agree that users downloading very large amounts of data consistently should be reminded of acceptable use policies however applying such drastic limitations onto customers accounts without making them aware of the fact that they i.e. Virgin Media do not like customers playing around with iPlayer too much is really not playing fair.

Do all of the ISPs over here do this now on non-Cabled accounts?

biglad

do people who have trouble have the top package with tv and phone etc

i constantly get speed just short of 10mbs and reguarly use the net and some days can play wii online for a couple of hours and never get any problems. dont download loads music etc but maybe an album a month but odd big item, did download a gig of stuff other day in less than hour