Virgin Media eases off bandwidth throttling

No change then

Given I can get nowhere near my 20Mbit line speed (most I've ever see is around 8Mb, central Edinburgh), even if they did cap me I'd see no difference then. The Virgin network is horribly slow at the best of times. Can't wait until they release their 50Mb service. At least then maybe I'll get over 10Mbit. *sigh*

What about ADSL users?

There's nothing about ADSL users anywhere. Are Virgin marginalising those users?

Getting there...

A move in the right direction...

Of course I'm on crappy copper, so I dream of downloading 300mb in 4 hours!

Theoretical speed

Theoretically, an ISP can offer 100Mbs. Reality is more like 1Mb.

While I'm not a 'valued' customer of VM, a colleague of mine is and he says at night, he'd be better of on dial up.

My own 'provider' promises me 16Mbs, which in reality is around 3Mbs. Not bad but could be bettter.

They'd all be better off not promising the earth and delivering Watford Gap. Invest in infrastructure methinks. Customers before profit because looking after your customers will improve profitability in the long run for these short-sighted gits.

Speed was never a problem...

..for me when I was a Virgin customer. Had their 2mb line and got exactly that.

Worked best when grabbing stuff straight off their newsgroups mind....

Good News...

... But from the sound of it the M & L customers wont be getting a speed increase in the near future so left out in the cold again!

I think the M ones limits before throttling is good, but the higher plans should have bigger limits and I agree 20MB should only be halved like the others!!!!!!!!

If they really want to be known as premium broadband provider they should increase the plans to the following:

Medium: 4MB £15.00

Large: 10MB £25.00

Xtra Large: 20MB £37.00

XXL: 50MB £50.00

How can fewer be affected?!

They are counting the upload now as well as the download, so more will be affected not less.

They have even extended the 4 hours to 5 hours!

And guess what! instead of dropping you down to 2Mb you'll be dropped to 1Mb!

So let's recap.

Let us disregard the 3% Virgin are saying, they would say that because we were getting sick of hearing the 5% everytime. 3% sounds so much better than 5% but not as good as maybe 1& they'll come up with the next time.

Anyway, let's recap.

Upload is now counted, so will affect more people than it did before as it was only download that counted before.

2Mb was bad enough, now let's have something to really complain about, you'll now get only 1Mb.

Instead of that slow 1Mb for 4 hours, it's been extended another 1 hour to 5 hours!

Everything's so much better now!

SUPERSONIC BROADBAND! YEH! YEH! YEH!

bloody hell...

...you lot don't know you're born!

"i wish i could get the full 20Mbit out of my connection"

i remember when the internet moved at the speed of mashed swede! because some of the backbone was made of it...

Wonder if it will work too?

I'm on their 20 mb "service" and am getting quite fed up of their throttling kicking in without my system having either uploaded or downloaded. I am a heavy user at times but that is what I (expected) and paid for.

I am currently on a 3 month freebie with them but when that ends I am downgrading as its simply not worth paying 37 quid for broadband you cannot use.

20mbit fine in Leeds

In the Leeds area (Headingley and previously the nearby town of Harrogate) I can get full 20mbit whenever I connect to something capable of giving that to me. Now, I'll tell you this for sure, that is a rare occurance. Not much on the net is designed to feed you stuff at over 2MB/s, but I have a client on a 100mbit dedicated host and I can get top speed from that server at nearly all times of the day. It's slightly less in the evenings - around 1.5MB/s.

I used to see those speeds on a regular basis before 10/23... sniff.

Re: Theoretical 20Mbs

I get 2Mbytes/sec pretty consistently on VM both inside and outside of the threshold times, so no complaints at all on that front.

However I, like a lot of people I'd wager, would happily forfeit some of the insane download speed (especially in light of the capping) for more upload speed. Not looking to host a website or anything but it would be nice to be able to stream my Sky box output at a nice bitrate. :)

Heh...

So glad I got off all these "Fair Use Policy" ISP's before the fit hit the shan. Zen is my new home. Granted, I have a 50gb max download per month before I'm capped...but providing I don't go mad with downloading I'm usually good. Also no cap on uploads, no traffic shaping or anything which makes most ISPs bad. ;)

Too little Too late

I was with virgin for 5 years. In that time I have exprienced the level or competance akin to a ameba ordering a meal in McDonalds with Burger king vouchers. The indian call center is a waste of my hearing and has NEVER done anything for me. I only ever got joy dealing with the liverpool call center - sad but factualy 100% my experience.

I see people with cloned modems left right and center - campaigned for VM to sort, told then how to do it. they have not done a thing, instead only cripperling paying customers. So I joined them after I foolishy refered 3 friends only to find no 3x£30 loaytay payments, no. It actualy cost me. After 2 months chassing the payments due to me and also the extra charges to call them to sort out there many mistakes I though fuck em and got a cloned modem and there is nothing there going to do about it.

WTF

Never having read any of the c**p VM have sent me, I didn't even know there were download limits, I'm sure my original Telewest (Birmingham Cable) connection had no limits !!!!

Anyway the whole thing has become so sloooow since VM took over, don't know what they've done to it.

And in all the years it was Blueyonder, it was only offline for about 12hrs in total (over about 5yrs) now the bloody thing never works. VM load of sh1t.

I get 20Mbit easily

... Off peak anyway. And I don't believe for one second that it only applies to the top 5% of people, I download bugger all compared to some people (i've seen figures of 1TB+ a month from some, I don't manage that in a whole year) but I still get capped come 3GB and 4PM when I do feel the need to stretch my downloading legs.

The new caps don't sound like easing off at all, I don't think anyone will be fooled by this announcement.

ADSLosers

Yet again, VM prove they are all about *cable* broadband users.

What about us poor sods on their shockingly bad ADSL service?

What of the recent traffic prioritisation work (about 2 weeks ago) that meant all streaming/video/VoIP/gaming data was treated as P2P, and throttled right back - which, due to the time-sensitive nature of gaming packets, meant that gaming was broken? And, when it wasn't broken, latency was 220-280ms!?!?

Just have a look at:

http://bazza.dyndns.org/rrdstats/baz14all.cgi?p=1y

And you'll see the poor latency for yourself.

Actually, see if you can guess the month when I moved onto their ADSL service?!

But, what do I care? Branson can stick his ADSL broadband service up his jacksy. I'm off to Be. Should be activated tomorrow.

I hope Beardy-Branson takes the £50 "exit fee" I'm having to pay, and puts it towards more infrastructure. Because, they sorely need the investment.

@ Martin Richards

I regularly pull around 18.8mb / 2.3 MB a sec off newshosting.com newsgroup servers in europe with 8 concurrent conections - a full 4.7 MB DVD iso in 50MB chunks takes in the region of 30 to 33 mins - the same film ... errr - test object in xvid format ~760 mb in 15MB chunks takes in the region of 5 mins 30 secs.

That is not a speed I am going to complain about or realisticly get with an ADSL provider considering I am more than a stones throw from my nearest exchange (Zen and BeBroadband both said I would should expect next to bugger all as I live 7 miles from an exchange)

And all the people with cloned cable boxes and TV services - where I live 50 odd miles north of London, they have started shutting down the cable boxes & the guys who make/chip the TV Boxes recon they are for the crapper any time soon (my guess is new years eve so when you come home after a night on the sherbert no more free Pr0n - not that UK cable pr0n is even worth watching - we had to check it out for *cough* research reasons you understand)

Anon as I like my service

*disclaimer*

Any downloads were all done as part of research. Downloading TV eppisodes due to "Lets fsck up a bank next" Beardy Branson being able to agree with meglomaniac Murdoch supports lost at sea cannoists and Osama Bin Hiding. You shouldnt do it.

This post may contain traces of nuts and will only help with weight loss as part of a callorie controlled diet.

@ barry et al

that wasn't just VM-ADSL. The backhaul everywhere is f00ked(excuse northern slang) and the roleout of ex-chinese-govt.-comms-arm company manufactured MSAN into the variously hammered Rings over the last month or so has helped fractionally but the infrastructure is still woefully innadequate.. ADSL still sucks. not to mention the knock-on perceptual 'failings' in lower tier ISPs as the BT/VM backhaul fails more for them than the owners of the big networks. They're hardly going to harm their own public clientel when they have business 'partners' with a client base ready and willing to move to the bigger two..

Then there's the idea of 'Contract Negotiations' at company level for supply of the backhaul network in some areas.. being held to 'ransome' as your business is entirely contingent upon supply of a fundamental component owned and controlled by a rival..

I get 235kbps downstream on VM and go and get some sleep, my expectations are not generated by the companies providing the supply.. they just lie. My sympathies to the rest of the virtual world with requirements above and beyond having a little patience... I too remember the un-alloyed joy of getting a dial-up to do 46kbps..

Cable is fine.

Got a 20Mbit VM cable connection.

Typically used to only max about 7.2MBits and complained a couple of times to VM but they told me that I'd only ever see max speeds at 4am.

Ioverlooked several things though. :D While studying for a N+ decided it was best to ditch my wireless Netgear rangemax and try a "borrowed" cisco switch.

I then ditched the "mainstream" broadband testers in favour of a download manager & popular "legal" movie download site.(based in Russia although you have to pay $1.99 per movie :(...)

My next words were along the line "Holy flaking Christmas".

Downloaded a 690Mb AVI file in 4 Minutes 41 Seconds. :D That included about 20 seconds of sourcing time by the download manager.

Surely a fluke.

Tried it again with a different movie - exact same speed ~20MBits/second or roughly 2.5MBytes per second. Even during peak times.

Downloaded some MSDN software at a similar speed & just downloaded the ISO pointed out by Martin Richards above and it managed to build up to about 9Mbits/s before it finished through the download manager. I expect it could have gone higher as it found 19 sources but only managed to trigger 8 of them before the download completed(about 14 seconds).

Turns out my Netgear couldn't handle multiple connections.

Tried a belkin and it stopped responding when I sourced from 8 or more.

I thought I was tech savy but obviously I missed this one.

A few months ago

I got a new PC and once I had the OS installed I started downloading updates and drivers and VS Express and a couple of games (mostly through Steam). It didn't take that long for my connection to get throttled, and I had to leave some of it going overnight. I'm also pretty sure that VNC has ended up throttling my connection occasionally.

I've said it before and I'll say it again - there's no point VM supplying a service which it can't provide. Everyone will get hit by throttling once in a while, and when they do it will piss them off as much as a 'heavy downloader'. If you can't provide constant 20mbps to everyone you sell the service to, then don't sell that service. If 8mbps or 4mbps were still the top speeds for home connections they would have no need to throttle it, and who really needs 20mbps for a home connection? Maybe they could offer an inbetween work from home connection for those of us who have heavy demands on file transfers when we're working at home for a price that companies wouldn't mind paying for, but that home users alone might not afford. Until we have a much better backbone we shouldn't be supplying anything above 12mbps to home users as shown by VMs aggressive throttling and other ISPs' capping.

slightly pointless for XL users

its slightly/stupid for XL users. i am myself with the XL package and never recieve move than a speed of 2Mbit/s between these peak times as it is... maybe they should focus on actually giving the speeds they advertise first just so i can download this amount of information first... mmmm large amounts of porn...

@ Nexox Enigma

Its idiots like you which are the reason the network is f**ked in the first place.

I pay for the XL service, i am in Manchester and have made a point to do a speed test on mine most evenings, every night is under 1mb, roughly between 0.7/0.9Mbs, so a) yes think yourself lucky b) what in f**ks name do you need to download 200gb in a weekend? just so you can tell your mates you have 200gb worth of shit on your hard disk??

stop whinging

You're lucky to have a decent speed connection in the first place. Out in the Devon countryside I have a 512/256k adsl connection, with no prospect of it ever getting faster. So when you get "throttled", you're still on a far faster connection than little old me!

cowboys

I obviously don't check my email often enough, as I was not aware of any change in policy. I rarely use my 2Mb connection but had to reboot the modem at the weekend when i wanted to use it. After I did, I found I was getting downloads of around 23K/s from most websites and speedtests confirmed my downloads as being somewhere between 1.3Mb and 1Mb. I know speedtests aren't completely accurate, but when I ran them under T/W I was always getting much higher results.

As someone who doesn't really download anything outside of work, i'm a bit miffed that i'm being throttled when i've done nothing wrong.

All I can say is I never had any issues when T/W ran the service....

Still crap

'L' customers throttled by a quarter! Much worse than the current setup.

Virgin just love slapping their customers..... avoid!

New CEO with a new 'view from the bridge'

I'm sick of these idiots, how many CEO's has this poor fated company been through? At least 5 in the past 6 years, how can they follow a game plan when some cheesy mofo pops his two penneth in to try and show the shareholders he was worth the x ammount of millions they get paid. I used to work for Telewest in sheffield many moons ago, I know how much of a shambles it was behind the scenes then, god knows what its like now.... Poor sods who have to deal with irate customers sent thier way from hidious desicions made by the upper echeleons of the adminisphere.

Well I'm a VM fanboy...

...can't disagree though Telewest were heaps better!

I can still grab a 700MB XVID "file" in 11 minutes and I'm on the 20Mbit package, all I know it's waaaay faster than driving to my local video shop :-D