[ant_j]

I have found an offer with virgin at the moment of half price bb with phone package.. The 20meg bb is £10 a month for first 6 months.

My current provider adsl24 is awesome and cant fault them, healthy 4 meg speed has 30gig peak and 300 gig off peak usage with no throttling etc.

Doe virgin have throttling? I poss only use about 10-20 gig usage a month across the peak and off peak.

Poss a film a month and 20 tracks is all i d/l.

Thanks in advance

[dan1979]

Yes, they do.

If you have the cheek to actually use your connection for a short period of time you'll lose 50-75% of the speed for the next five hours.

http://www.virginbroadband.com/html/...t/traffic.html

Oh Telewest how we miss you

[Davecl]

no throttling from 21:00 till 10:00 apparently

[CP-PC]

yes VM do throttle (on the 20mb package its 3gb daily limit, if you exceed this they cut you down to 512k speed) VM peak times are from 9am through till 9pm. and VM are currently trialing 24hour throttling times. how do you download your films and music??? legaly??? VM are currently running a campagn with the BPI to stop illegal downloads and are sending out warning letters to anyone they suspect of downloading illegal/copyrighted content. i beleive they are currently running a "3 strikes and our out" policy. VM BB is suposed to be "unlimited" but its subject to their "fair usage" policy.
on the 20mb package if you exceed 3gb durring peak time (between 9am-9pm) then they will throttle your line to 512k for 5 hours but people have been reporting that the 5hour throttle has been constantly lasting much longer than 5 hours and some people have been throttled to 512k for 24hours at a time before it gets put back up to full speed. i would advise agains joining VM BB at this time. download something like "net monitor" or "net limiter" to monitor your internet useage. it will give you a good idea about how much you use your internet.

[The_Scifiboy]

Maybe I've read your post wrong CP-PC but aren't you mixing connection speed and download speed?

If you have the 20meg package before you get throttled you'll connect at around 20mbit/, and download at about 2mbyte/s. After you get throttled you'll connect at 5mbit/s and download at roughly 512k.

By comparing the unthrottled connection speed with the throttled download speed you make it look a lot worse than it actually is. Which isn't to say that it's good, but connecting at 5mbit for 5 hours is not as bad as the ISP's that stop your service if you go above your monthly limit, you can at least still use the net even after VM throttle you.

I've been hit with the STM limit a few times incorrectly so I'm not it's biggest fan by any means, but even with that when looking at what they say they can offer and what they end up delivering VM are still the most reliable ISP I've ever had. So I'd recommend them and I have a number of times even after this STM thing started.

[ant_j]

Thanks for all the insite guys.
I use programmes such as utorrent and dc++ to usually obtain movies and music.

Prob best staying put for now? Whats STM?

Thanks again

[nialli]

I thought they only throttled if the limit is exceeded after 4pm?

[The_Scifiboy]

Originally Posted by ant_j

Thanks for all the insite guys.
I use programmes such as utorrent and dc++ to usually obtain movies and music.

Prob best staying put for now? Whats STM?

Thanks again

As long as you don't have Utorrent and/or DC++ going full whack all the time (and from your previously stated levels of usage I'm assuming you don't) you'll probably only fall foul of the traffic management a couple of times a month if at all. Since on VM XL you'd have 3 gig a day between 4 and 9pm and you say you only d/l about 20gb a month you should be fine on VM.

And STM stands for Subscriber Traffic Management.

Nialli, they started doing morning traffic management (10am to 3pm download management) a few months ago, the limits are a lot higher to reflect the longer period of time STM is active. The general assumption is that they realized lots of the big downloaders just moved their downloads to the morning so VM managed the downloads then as well.

[CP-PC]

sorry i was under the impression that VM throttled the speed to 512k (64k/bytes) but maybe i was wrong and its down to 5mb (512k/bytes)