New Traffic Management Trial for Virgin Media

megatron

megatron

megatron

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The trial is to assess wether new limits will more effectively stop heavy users from effecting the masses. Although with new limits on the weekend, it sounds like occational users will be hit aswell as die hard bandwidth hogs.

http://www.thinkbroadband.com/news/3872-preston-wigan-blackpool-in-virgin-media-stm-trial.html

Old traffic management scheme:
http://allyours.virginmedia.com/html/internet/traffic.html
http://www.virginmedia.com/help/traffic-management.php

Personally I've only noticed being managed once and probably only realised it was management not just poor service since I use a bandwidth monitoring tool found on the website in the top link (used for determining if I am getting close to the bandwidth caps, you can define your own trigger levels).
 
Is it me or are they slowly edging away from their ridiculously strict policies enforced a couple of years back? They are getting more reasonable though, that kinda cap limit isn't really a problem for me now.

I had a lol at this comment too:

"Posted by sloman 4 days ago
Well i am VIP customer with Virgin and pay approximately £80 per month to them.

If this goes live bye bye Virgin.

Its like buying a Bugatti Veyron and Bugatti saying we are going to limit it
to 60mph!

Do this and you will lose most of your premium customers! Us fools who pay
for 10-20MB."

Err... where have you been for the last 2 years chum?
 
might have been with ukonline or be?

same as me, full speed all the time when ever i like. Virgin are pants with this stm as i have this at another address
 
Yikes - the weekend limits seem a little draconian - 11 hours worth of throttling window - I wonder a what point they will no longer be able to claim '20mb' as you are unable to use it at that speed for most of the time - I wonder if that's why the weekend period is just less than half the day...

I have to say - now that I have started using steam, iplayer, and a few other online delivery methods I am often getting hit and it is starting to grind my gears. Will have to see where this is all heading over the next 12 months and then review when my current cycle is done. :(
 
Smirnoff said:
For how long tho ? They will most likely wait till people that download a lot move onto 50mb then cap that as well
Click to expand...

Im sure they are just waiting for enough people to sign up and be contract locked for 12 months and they can guarantee a years worth of profit, then oversubscribe the service and then the mythical top 5% of users will be blamed, then STM it to death then the carousel begins again at the next so called unlimited headline speed launch.

=====-Virgin Broadband Script-=====

1. Launch Product.
2. Sign as many users as you can up regardless of wether the network can cope.
3. When the service is obviously suffering from oversubscribing and we have enough 12 month contract locks blame the mythical 5% and begin STM.
4. Hire some big name movie star that already gets crap loads of money and pay them crap loads more money to lie about the service being unlimited to the nation.
5. Repeat process at every launch of so called Broadband.
 
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i assumed that they hadnt updated it yet, based on VM phone customer services, i cant imagine their website been any quicker lol....

50mb will be capped, very quickly imo
 
It's really funny. So, you get 20Mbit line, capable of downloading 9Gb per hour and 20 minutes later you hit 3Gb trigger and end up being throttled by 75% for the rest of the day.

Talking about getting nowhere really fast....
 
I'm fine with it, looks less restrictive than the current system to me, we get more hours of off-peak.
It's not exactly hard to just download big stuff like Steam Games overnight, especially with schedulers, and there's enough peak allowance to get stuff in a pinch.
Not that being on 75% is the end of the world anyway, you can still stream video, and it's not THAT slow - heck, 2.5Mb (I'm on 10Mb) is more than I reliably get when I'm at my parents house anyways.

Much prefer this system to hard caps or price increases.
 
I left not too long after Virgin took over Telewest, up until then I had been a cable customer since they first rolled cable into my street many many years ago when they used to be Cableinet ;)

Up until Virign took over I had nothing but praise for the service, reliability and speed were outstanding and recommended them to everyone as a result.
Now I'm not a heavy user but used to download many different Linux distros and other assorted crap like game demos, mmo patches etc. so every once in a while I would be a heavy user for a day or two. It was then that I first discovered Virgin's traffic management, as no matter what I downloaded at same time it would never go above 1Mbit one day (was on 4Mbit package), so my connection is pretty idle most of the month and on this day I get my connection cut by 75%, as you can imagine I was pretty miffed.

If that wasn't bad enough Branson decides to have a spat with Sky and we lose most of my Sky TV channels like Sky One etc on which I was watching a few series which were being premiered on Sky One, his excuse being they were too expensive. Now we lost these channels for months but did we get our TV package cost reduced during this period, like hell, Branson pockets the saving which according to him was very substantial.

Add these two events together and what you get is a customer that will never touch Virgin again, what was once a superb TV + Internet package quickly got flushed down the drain :mad:
 
Virgin did not take over ntl:telewest, people need to stop assuming they did. NTL:Telewest payed baught virgin mobile, part of the deal was that they would take on the virgin name. Although Branson does have a fair ammount of stake in the company, the same people who ran NTL:Telewest now run virgin media, except now they sell mobile packages too.

You mention your connection being idle most of the month, so that means that most of the month the STM did not even effect you in any way, its only on the days you became a heavy user that it kicked it, and rightly so.

As for the SKY channels, it was too expensive because SKY thought that because NTL:Telewest took over virgin mobile, they must be rolling in the money so they increase the price of the channels if VM wanted to continue using them, VM didn't want to pay all this extra money for no reason, so it didn't renew the contract.
 
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My view is that of a customer, the business dealings between the various parties are irrelevant to me. Who was to blame for the loss of the premium channels from my package is also irrelevant, if they did not renew the contract was the saving then passed onto the customer? No.

Dist said:
You mention your connection being idle most of the month, so that means that most of the month the STM did not even effect you in any way, its only on the days you became a heavy user that it kicked it, and rightly so.
Click to expand...

Downloading 2-3 gig a month would put me as one of the very lightweight users out there with most ISP's, I dared to make use of the bandwidth on a rare occasion and I get managed, rightly so? I think not. Now I am with Be, significantly cheaper, reliable and no traffic management at any time :D
 
hegemon said:
My view is that of a customer, the business dealings between the various parties are irrelevant to me. Who was to blame for the loss of the premium channels from my package is also irrelevant, if they did not renew the contract was the saving then passed onto the customer? No.



Downloading 2-3 gig a month would put me as one of the very lightweight users out there with most ISP's, I dared to make use of the bandwidth on a rare occasion and I get managed, rightly so? I think not. Now I am with Be, significantly cheaper, reliable and no traffic management at any time :D
Click to expand...

Yeah :/ I kinda wish theyd just put bandwidth limits on like every other normal ISP.

Either that or put reasonable STM limits. The way it is at the moment, if I buy a new game from steam, I either have to wait till Im out of the STM hours to download it or download most of it and then have my bandwidth lowered for 5 hours.

This new STM trial will just mean that I download the game even slower because Ill be throttled quicker. The only perk is that the throttling turns off at 11 or whatever the time mentioned but that doesnt make up for the retarded limits.
 
hegemon said:
My view is that of a customer, the business dealings between the various parties are irrelevant to me. Who was to blame for the loss of the premium channels from my package is also irrelevant, if they did not renew the contract was the saving then passed onto the customer? No.
Click to expand...
So if sky ramps up its prices to a silly ammount you think its VMs fault if they choose not to pay? And the savings were not passed on because they added new channels instead like FX and paid to get things like terminator the sarah connor chronicles on virgin 1.

hegemon;13513423 Downloading 2-3 gig a month would put me as one of the very lightweight users out there with most ISP's said:
On the days you are a lightweight user you get to use all your bandwidth, like you should be able to. On days you are heavy user where your heavy downloading can affect the performance of other people in your area you get limmited. As soon as you go back to being a lightweight user again you can continue with your full bandwidth.

Do you think they should let you degrade the service of others in your area a few times a month just because for the majority of the month your a lightweight user?
Click to expand...
 
Dist said:
On the days you are a lightweight user you get to use all your bandwidth, like you should be able to. On days you are heavy user where your heavy downloading can affect the performance of other people in your area you get limmited. As soon as you go back to being a lightweight user again you can continue with your full bandwidth.

Do you think they should let you degrade the service of others in your area a few times a month just because for the majority of the month your a lightweight user?
Click to expand...

Oh cmon, downloading more than 3gb doesnt make you a heavy user in this day and age. Just because you dont download this much doesnt mean its reasonable to limit others. If they limits were more reasonable then it wouldnt bother me too much but theyre a bit on the low side imo.

Also, I cant help but think all this monitoring is affecting performance of connections in games :/
 
i'm on the XL 20mb package and tbh i never see much over a 5-8mb download speed during daytime hours anyway. shoots up to 18/19 in the early hours of the morning. It's a total **** take as Its sold as a no download limit package but yet there are secret limits.
 
Clum said:
i'm on the XL 20mb package and tbh i never see much over a 5-8mb download speed during daytime hours anyway. shoots up to 18/19 in the early hours of the morning. It's a total **** take as Its sold as a no download limit package but yet there are secret limits.
Click to expand...

Blueyonder always said that you needed 4 simultaneous downloads to check what download speed you were getting. However from your story, it looks like it slows down during the day due to lots of users using at once, hence it makes traffic management look like a good idea.

Personally in most cases I don't care how long a download takes. I'm impressed if I see anything over 10Mbps from a single download with 20Mb connection.
 
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