Virgin Media - New STM hours being trialled

do VM throttle usenet

im using giganews + VMs own servers and for the last few days the VM & giga servers have been really really slow i changed to ports used on both and giganews speed as returned but VM is still slow as hell

dont want to have to fork of for encryption
 
When I was with newshosting it was fine and that was about a week ago. Switched to giganews with SSL now though, and that is still very fast. But still slow in the evenings like newshosting was, some days I cant load youtube videos during the evening.
 
ScoobyDoo said:
How the network can be saturated at 11am in the morning i dont know. I understand the 4pm - 9pm STM when the network is getting used the most after people are coming home from school,work etc but 11am in the morning!!
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It's probably when all the lazy students get out of bed and start leeching. They may be a relatively small proportion of the population, but remember that younger people tend to use the 'net more and probably want to grab all the latest game demos, movie trailers, music samples, human reproduction eductational videos etc
 
I've been with NTL for over 7 years and this is my first complaint.
I can live with going down from 5mbit to 1mbit during the evening because I download during the night but since wednesday from 8pm my connection has become unuseable.
Running this test shows me at well below 56k.
 
Sem said:
do VM throttle usenet

im using giganews + VMs own servers and for the last few days the VM & giga servers have been really really slow i changed to ports used on both and giganews speed as returned but VM is still slow as hell

dont want to have to fork of for encryption
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are VM's news servers still working for you? according to grabit they haven't been updated since the 1st of this month.

what other providers are half decent that can provide decent speeds and a good solid connection? gaming is virtually impossible on virgin due to packet loss.
 
I'd be fine with their STM policies if it didn't cripple the connection everytime it happens to the point where you're waiting 10-30 secs for a webpage to load or inevitably timeout. Totally kills online gaming too :(
 
Add this to the list

Virgin Media CEO Neil Berkett has attacked the principle of net neutrality, whereby internet service providers do not interfere with or degrade the speed at which content is delivered from websites to consumers, branding it as "********".

Feeding into the debate between internet service providers and the BBC over iPlayer, Berkett even warned that public service broadcasters who choose not to pay for faster access to Virgin's subscriber base would end up in "bus lanes", effectively having their content delivered to consumers at a lower speed.
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I'd link to the original article but certain letters of the sweary are not fully blanked.

It's on digital spy under cable.
 
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jklc said:
I'd be fine with their STM policies if it didn't cripple the connection everytime it happens to the point where you're waiting 10-30 secs for a webpage to load or inevitably timeout. Totally kills online gaming too :(
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Your surfing is down to DNS issues.

Its all went Pete Tong since NTL (under VM name) Took over
 
It's mayhem trying to play on the 360 at weekends, Gears of War needs to use too much traffic and all my friends are on Virgin and their upload speeds are crippled.
 
I mentioned a few posts above that since wednesday I come to a part of the evening where even browsing becomes unuseable.
Is there a program I can run 24/7 that monitors and logs your speed?
 
Directly from the Newsgroups.

QUOTED :

" Hi,

I know there have been many queries regarding STM (Traffic Management), and below is the official statement regarding changes to the STM policy.

If you have any questions or comments, please can I ask that you post these in the Feedback group (virginmedia.feedback) to keep the support groups clear for the team to respond to service affecting issues. This has been cross-posted to feedback.

Thankyou.

STM Statement:

As part of our continued efforts to improve our customer's broadband experience we are continuing to trial measures which will more efficiently and pro-actively manage network traffic.

As part of our continued efforts to improve our customer's broadband experience, we are making changes to the current Traffic Management Policy within certain trial regions.

This updated policy will be trialed within the following regions

Preston, Wigan, Blackpool, Camden, Dalston, Enfield and Haringey.


These measures are based on policies that detect traffic patterns that are deemed potentially abnormal and apply traffic management rules to ensure that other customers are not adversely affected by this traffic.

The trial aims to prevent or reduce the effects of a minority of users abusing the network and preventing the majority of subscribers from having the network performance they desire.

For the vast majority of customers, upwards of 95% of the base, their experience will be a more consistent speed (both upload and download).

Those who have the policies applied to their connection will
experience their download / upload speed being constrained (less than 5% affected). Breach of acceptable use policy may lead to these policies being applied.

These optimisation policies are being trialed during the following times where the potential for abnormal traffic has been identified as having the greatest adverse impact on our customers' experience.

10am - 3pm Download only
4pm - 9pm Download
3pm - 8pm Upload


During these times the following thresholds will be applied for upstream and downstream.

10am - 3pm Download
Size M: 900Mb
Size L: 2400Mb
Size XL: 6000Mb

4pm - 9pm Download
Size M: 450Mb
Size L:1200Mb
Size XL: 3000Mb

3pm - 8pm Upload
Size M: 200Mb
Size L: 700Mb
Size XL: 1400Mb "
 
The funnisest thing is all the people threatening to leave VM over this - they dont seem to realise is that that is *exactly* what VM want.

VM are like any other ISP - their peering arrangements mean that they have to pay for every byte that they transfer from higher tier ISPs, yet commercially they obviously offer flat rate packages.

SO if the higher rate users make good on their threats then VM will see an *increase* in profits, since they'll be losing a huge chunk of bandwidth costs, yet seeing a tiny decrease in income, as only the top few % of users that represent the high bandwidth users will be the ones who quit.
 
bliss said:
Less than 5% affected. :rolleyes:
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Probably not far off, TBH. Dont forget that this forum is full of young nerds, who spend their lives downloading huge chunks of content. There are many, many, many more people out there who only use their connection for some web browsing and the odd email.
 
If there are many many more people using Virgin for reading emails etc and only 5% are using it for other purposes why are they bothering to offer any kind of high speed? why not just offer 2mbit and do away with offering high speed? after all it's only needed by a small minority. The reason the network gets hammered is all these p2p kiddies who upload all day and night, if they all used newsgroups where there is no uploading forced on the user this would not be a problem, uploading is far more saturating than downloading, Torrents are to blame for this.
 
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