Virgin Traffic Shaping - Disgrace

[toons]

I've recently notice a massive slow down in my connection on both download and upload; it appears that virgin has introduced traffic shaping.

Virgin announced this in May but it's only just affected me this week.

It claims it only affects top 5%

Got this from ITPro

Traffic shaping - the industry's term for temporarily reducing individual user's speeds - will be applied at varying thresholds. Subscribers to the M package will have their download speed cut to 1Mbps (from 2Mbps) for four hours if they download 350MB during peak hours; L subscribers will be limited to 2Mbps (from 4Mbps) for exceeding 750MB and XL subscribers to 5Mbps (from 10 and in some cases 20Mbps) for exceeding 3GB. Upstream speeds will also be cut.

More info on the Vigin website

[toons]

Just looked on page two and this topic has already been covered, so sorry for that.

Has anyone changed supplier since being throttled?

[t1m103]

the shaping is supposed to cut in after 4-12 if youve downloaded a certain amount of data,well all i can say that is complete bo**ocks i get home from work at 4.30pm,turn on my laptop and straight away its down from 20mb to 4mb without me even downloading anything.spoke to a virgin employee and he recons everybody will get shaped in between those times as thats when its most busy so to make sure evry body can get some bandwidth its capped.ive got this week off ork and during the day its deffinatly 20mb but come 4pm down to 4mb.

[toons]

I agree, I hadn't downloaded anything between 4-12 and it was soooooo slow.

I’m playing online games and need all the upload speed I can get.

Gonna look at changing to a none-throttled supplier

[chris57]

I'm trying out BeBroadband due to the throttling and 25p per min charges.

Attenation etc. should give me 10mb/s unlimited for £24/month. Exactly what I was getting from Virgin before the 'fantastic' upgrade to 20mb/s.

[triplea4uk]

BE is not unlimited it has fair usage policy so if you plan to download say 200gb and at peak times they will be sending you emails and lot of people forget you pay Be £24 then BT £11 line rental.


I can see why VM has done this most people I know only went to them because they could download all the time but they are punishing a lot of people that don't download they will denie it but I think they have set it up so everyone at peak times is affected.

Anyway Good Luck with what you do BE are very good ISP.

[chris57]

Be is unlimited in terms of being without any throttling and you pay Virgin extra for your phone. So £24 against £37 per month is a saving if you live near the exchange or have a good noise free line.

Virgin has a fairuse policy in addition to the throttling.

[eaglemmoomin]

Originally Posted by toons

I agree, I hadn't downloaded anything between 4-12 and it was soooooo slow.

I’m playing online games and need all the upload speed I can get.

Gonna look at changing to a none-throttled supplier

Yeah but the upload bw needed for games is'nt going to be enormous is it. Most of it is going to be positional/status information it'll be in the order of bytes not Mb

[Rygar]

Originally Posted by eaglemmoomin

Yeah but the upload bw needed for games is'nt going to be enormous is it. Most of it is going to be positional/status information it'll be in the order of bytes not Mb

The more the better if you are the one actually hosting the game.