Virgin Media traffic management

mvan

Could anybody clarify the traffic management Virgin Media apply to their broadband users, I understand the reason Virgin claim (to manage heavy users) but fail to agree with the policy based their public adverts. The policy appears to be to cap users.

I am currently on the 2Mb M service which is capped (sorry managed!) as follows:
1000-1500 download >1GB 50% reduction in speed for 5 hours
1600-2100 download >500MB 50% reduction in speed for 5 hours

- Is this an accumulative total for those hours?
- Can I download "unlimited" outside those hours (ie between 1500-1600)?
- Can you tell if you are being "managed" apart from raw speed test (which might indicate a fault)?
- Virgin quote this is to stop heavy users (top 5%) but I consider myself normal usage using itunes/bbc iplayer/work files and think the thresholds would trigger on a lot more than 5%.
- Their adverts are a bit misleading with regard to these limits, currently "Want to download films, music and photos faster?", an itunes movie rental is around 1GB, itunes albums are around 500MB, all legal downloads.

Nilrem

it's cumulative for each period, but it doesn't carry over from one to the other (it resets the counter at the end of the period, however if you trip the stm it will carry over as it's on it's own timer).

Outside of the hours it is unlimited (well as much as any isp's service can be*) - we're fairly heavy users here (Steam etc), and on the 20mb we've never tripped the STM despite some nights downloading 30+gb outside of hours.

You can't tell if you've been managed without looking at the speeds you are getting, currently VM don't seem to have the ability to inform customers.

Heavy Users = Heavy Users for the package type from what i can tell, basically if you're on the lowest package it's sort of expected you're likely to be the sort of user who doesn't use the net in a heavy manner.

The adverts are a little misleading but not much, given that they do multiple tiers and they only have the "download faster" in regards to their higher tiers, and people that are likely to be using things like Itunes a lot are also likely to want the content fastest and thus be on the higher tiers (where it's not unreasonable to assume if you've downloaded a 1-2gb movie rental you're not going to be using the connection a huge amount whilst you're watching it).

Basically their tiers are
2mb (going up to 10mb with lower stm threshold soon) - people who just want a basic net connection for things like online shopping, gaming or email (you'll not generally trigger STM playing online games, emails, general browsing for example).

10mb - medium tier - possibly 2 or more people sharing a connection, not overly heavy users, may like youtube etc (even STM's the connection is perfectly able to cope with iplayer, youtube, online gaming etc).

20mb - higher tier - heavyish users, possibly multiple fairly heavy users, even with stm you're getting better than the national average for internet connectivity (IIRC the national average is about 4Mb).

50mb - highest tier/premium, very heavy users who like everything now.

the 2mb tier is about equiivilent to what a lot of ADSL companies supply as their basic product, often with very low monthly caps (IIRC BT do a 2mb connection with something like 2-5gb monthly cap overwhich you pay more).

The 20mb teir, even with STM allows you to potentially download well over 100GB a day, which compares extremely favourably to what a lot of ADSL suppliers allow (many either have their own STM or monthly caps over which they charge extra, or cap the speed right down until the end of the billing cycle).

Basically there isn't a one size fits all internet package, and their packages are priced/stm'd to match rough usuage profiles.

*You're always at risk of being in an area with a lot of heavy users that can affect your speed, but that's the same regardless of if your on adsl or cable.

mvan

Thanks for the info, not convinced that the thresholds are high enough for what is getting to be normal internet use for an increasing number of people, to avoid people getting a lower service for which they have paid for. Virgin have cut the 2Mb service for low usage users and increased the monthly fees for those users without any alternative (apart from leaving) to an uncompetitive price (O2 & Sky offer much lower monthly fees, this is OK for most "standard" net users).

Virgin first put this traffic management in place to cut data rates for heavy users they considered to be downloading illegal material but as more and more legal services provide ever increasing file sizes then more and more people are going to be hitting these thresholds and finding the service they paid for is not available. My recent experience is that the service is starting to get worse, data rates are slowing down, its difficult to get a straight answer on what caused the network faults (usual story from support, have you plugged the pc in etc..., we can see no problem..).

turthmaster

During the period 4PM till 9PM all customers downloads are limited to 3Gig or less, depending on your package.

Below are the rates that VM expect you to stay under, compared to the package speed you bought (or thought you did).

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XL Headline rate: 20Mb/s (20 Meg)

Allowance: 3 Gigabytes over 5 hours.

Actual speed you have to stay under not to trip STM: 1.33Mb/s
(1.3 meg, yes thats less than the lowest M service)

Reduction ratio: allowed to use only 1/15th of what you paid for, or your whole service is restricted, up and down.

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L Service (new)

Headline rate: 10Mb/s (10 Meg)

Allowance: 1.2 Gigabytes over 5 hours.

Actual speed you have to stay under not to trip STM: 0.53Mb/s
(0.5 meg, yes half a meg, the level of service available at launch 8 years ago)

Reduction ratio: allowed to use only 1/19th of what you paid for, or your whole service is restricted, up and down.

---

L service (old)

Headline rate: 4Mb/s (4 Meg)

Allowance: 1 Gigabyte over 5 hours.

Actual speed you have to stay under not to trip STM: 0.44Mb/s
(0.4 meg, 20% less than the service available on launch 8 years ago)

Reduction ratio: allowed to use only 1/10th of what you paid for, or your whole service is restricted, up and down.

---

M Service

Headline rate: 2Mb/s (2 Meg)

Allowance: 500 Megabytes over 5 hours.

Actual speed you have to stay under not to trip STM: 0.22Mb/s
(0.2 meg or 220k, the equivalent of 4x 56k phone modems)

Reduction ratio: allowed to use only 1/9th of what you paid for, or your whole service is restricted, up and down.