Virgin Media now traffic shaping

timberflake

For those that don't already know, Virgin Media are now traffic shaping P2P and Newsgroups. You may also experience problems with online gaming as VM are traffic shaping on certain ports and may see your online gaming on PS3/XBOX 360 as P2P traffic.

I loaded up my News Provider this morning and am only getting 2-3MBps on my 50mb connection, whereas I used to get 5-6MBps.

I just hope they don't apply traffic shaping to their 100mb service.

smcaul

Is this fact or just your opinion? Have you got anything to back this up?

custardy

We're happy to announce another free upgrade for our fibre optic broadband customers, injecting an ‘adrenaline shot’ of performance to boost upload speeds which will enablet hem to share large files such as photos and videos at an even faster rate. The upgrade has started to roll out and will automatically be applied across the country on its up to 10Mb, up to 20Mb and up to 50Mb services. Unlike some of our competitors’ ‘free’ upgrades, you will be able to take advantage of these new upload speeds as soon as their area is enabled, without the need to sign up or re-contract.

Powered by Virgin Media’s unique next generation broadband network, increased upload speeds will enable you to upload video to sites such as YouTube or Facebook in ultra-quick time or send files more swiftly to online backup services such as Virgin Media’s Online Back Up and Storage. Faster upload speeds also allow you do more at once, such as hosting larger online multiplayer games on popular games consoles, as well as provide greater capacity for family members to send, share, poke and tweet at the same time with minimal delay.

Broadband package
Download speed
New upload speed
(once enabled)
Time to upload a 1MB photo
Time to upload a 15MB video clip
M Up to 10Mb Up to 1Mb 9 seconds 2 mins 13 sec
L Up to 10Mb Up to 1Mb 9 seconds 2 mins 13 sec
XL Up to 20Mb Up to 2Mb 4 seconds 1 mins 7 sec
XXL Up to 50Mb Up to 5Mb 2 seconds 27 secconds




Jon James, executive director of broadband at Virgin Media said: “We’re once again pushing the boundaries of UK broadband with a true next generation broadband service that vastly outperforms struggling DSL-based services. With the huge growth in social networks these new upload speeds will help Virgin Media customers share their most precious moments and keep up with friends and families are up to, whether it’s uploading to YouTube or even hosting a live videochat to show off baby’s first steps in high-definition.”

As part of the roll-out and in order to ensure fair usage of available capacity we'll be rolling out a new traffic management system at peak times, designed to adapt to network conditions to ensure time-sensitive and interactive uses – such as surfing or streaming high-definition video – remain unhindered by non-time-sensitive traffic such as peer-to-peer and newsgroup activity, reducing the possibility of annoying buffering that can occur when trying to watch TV online at peak times. Using smart network monitoring, the system will reserve at least 75 per cent of network resources for high-priority traffic, adjusting dynamically to overall network usage to ensure consistent performance for more customers.

In addition, as the increased upstream speeds roll-out to customers, we're also increasing the peak time allowances for data transfer to ensure more customers can get the most out of their superfast broadband service. On a daily basis this traffic management system improves the performance that over 95 per cent of our customers receive, whilst helping to minimise the negative effect the five percent of heaviest users have by temporarily slowing down their speeds, ensuring a fair share of network resources during the busiest times. For customers on its premium up to 50Mb service, this slowdown will only operate on upload speeds and an extremely heavy user will see this reduce from up to 5Mb to up to 1.75Mb, above its pre-upgrade level of 1.5Mb. Despite these peak time traffic management measures, Virgin Media fibre optic broadband remains without monthly usage limits.

For further information on making the most of Virgin Media’s new upload speeds head to https://www.virginmedia.com/fasteruploads. While information on Virgin Media’s traffic management system can be found at https://www.virginmedia.com/traffic.

this is the latest update

timberflake

smcaul wrote: »

Is this fact or just your opinion? Have you got anything to back this up?

See the post above. It is fact, I've been on the official VM forums today talking to their tech guys and they confirmed that the reason my NewsProvider speeds have halved is because they've implimented the traffic management policy.

EDIT: If you refer http://www.virginmedia.com/traffic theres a section that says:

"We also moderate the total volume of file sharing traffic on our network between 5pm and midnight on weekdays and midday and midnight on weekends. This policy is restricted to Peer to Peer (“P2P”) applications and Newsgroups (which are commonly used to distribute large amounts of data)"

jb66

I also thaught it was just the upload that was restricted but on further reading thanks to kurtis blue it seems all tiers are now throttled and traffic shaped it seems to give virgin some leeway now on speeds, they can now say your only getting 30meg as your being traffic shaped.

From what I understood:

throttling is where they reduce your speed when you have downloaded too much

Traffic shaping is where they prioritise traffic with p2p, torrents and newsgroup at the bottom of the pile

Seems very confusing as it's all called traffic management now

robt_2

timberflake wrote: »

You may also experience problems with online gaming as VM are traffic shaping on certain ports and may see your online gaming on PS3/XBOX 360 as P2P traffic.

I would like to see some evidence of this part of your post, as it sounds like pure speculation and guesswork?

jb66

robt wrote: »

I would like to see some evidence of this part of your post, as it sounds like pure speculation and guesswork?

I too would like to see it as the reason shaping has came in is to improve gaming hd video streaming and Internet browsing speed

timberflake

robt wrote: »

I would like to see some evidence of this part of your post, as it sounds like pure speculation and guesswork?

Some online gaming use what traffic shaping software see as P2P applications.

I'm not saying VM are actively going out to traffic manage online gaming, but some could get caught up in it. They're not looking at it as "thats P2P - block it", "thats Newsgroups - block it", they're blocking certain ports, which means some applications, not meant for traffic management, could be affected.

baby_frogmella

Glasnost: Test if your ISP is shaping your traffic