Traffic Shaping Affecting All Tiers

[Shootist]

Looking over the 'net it seems that ex-virgin employees regard VM broadband as one big scam to sign up as many customers as possible, regardless of whether VM can provide a decent service or not, while having little or no plans to carry out any upgrades to ensure a decent service in the future.

Is this because VM are currently trying to sell their company, and are more interested in pumping up figures while leaving any existing infrastructure problems for whoever takes over?

[Sirius]

Originally Posted by Shootist

Looking over the 'net it seems that ex-virgin employees regard VM broadband as one big scam to sign up as many customers as possible, regardless of whether VM can provide a decent service or not, while having little or no plans to carry out any upgrades to ensure a decent service in the future.

Is this because VM are currently trying to sell their company, and are more interested in pumping up figures while leaving any existing infrastructure problems for whoever takes over?

Any links to that information from ex employees

[r00t]

News to me.
I had no idea this was the master plan

[Horace]

Yeah, it's strange a company wants to keep building its customer base, surely it should be shrinking the base for the benefit of it's current customers, I mean that's how you run a profitable company, right?

What VM is doing is no different from any other ISP. At least Virgin continually invest in their infrastructure unlike a lot of el-cheapo ISP's out there.

[ECW_Original]

Originally Posted by Horace

At least Virgin continually invest in their infrastructure unlike a lot of el-cheapo ISP's out there.

AND your proof of this??

Oh, you must mean STM & the stuppid 50Mb trials...

Yeah Right!!

[zachysat]

Originally Posted by ECW_Original

AND your proof of this??

Oh, you must mean STM & the stuppid 50Mb trials...

Yeah Right!!

of course pay for 4 meg or 20 and get half special offer he he he he

I see alex is up to his old tricks again on VM ngs bless him, removing topics about STM that make VM look bad

[Shootist]

Originally Posted by Horace

Yeah, it's strange a company wants to keep building its customer base...What VM is doing is no different from any other ISP.

Yes, and this is why the regulator is currently looking into the speed of broadband supplied by several ISP's.

Is it right to keep on selling to and taking money from new customers when you have no hope of properly supplying your services to the customers you already have?

[Magilla]

Originally Posted by Horace

What VM is doing is no different from any other ISP. At least Virgin continually invest in their infrastructure unlike a lot of el-cheapo ISP's out there.

Actually they're investing pretty much the bare minimum required to keep the system going.

[Toto]

Looks like VM are changing their STM metrics for early 2008.

http://www.virginmedia.com/help/traffic-management.php

Found a discussion on the VM newsgroups.

* Threshold changes that mean that only 3% of uploaders and
downloaders will be traffic managed on average (based on latest
network metrics) in each daily window - as opposed to the current 5%
of overall downloaders in each window. There is some overlap in
uploders and downloaders, with the overall volume of customers
impacted expected to be less than the current 5%.
* The changes mean that a customer on the 'XL' (20Mb) broadband tier
will now be able to theoretically download 55% more between 16:00 and
midnight than under the current traffic management policy.
* Amendment of windows so that no customers can have the traffic
management policy applied to their service after 2100 daily - the
daily traffic management application window now runs from 1600-2100
(is currently 1600-0000).
* Customers can now only be traffic managed once daily, as opposed to
the previous twice. The current 4 hour window changes to 5 hours, but
any traffic management application will be for a maximum of 5 hours
daily (currently can be 8 hours - 2x4 hours).
* A higher average bitrate threshold on each broadband tier.
* Introduction of an upload policy to complement the current download
policy - overall the customer impact is only 3% of customers being traffic managed by each policy - but less than 5% overall (see above).

[SOSAGES]

good news

[dav]

So, they are actually LOWERING the d/l cap on 2Mb?
Un-freakin-believable.
Planet Virgin must be a wonderful place to live.
Do they actually listen to the screams of rage from people on the lowest tier who use the least overall bandwidth on a 1 to 1 basis? Of course they don't.

[Kymmy]

At least it seems that they're being pro-active and actually varying thier system in a reaction to feedback/complaints...but in the end no traffic shaping system will be welcome by everyone.

At least it's better than the DSL companies, about 90% of them have monthly FUP's set to about 40GB (though there are some set higher) if you break the FUP (no matter what time you download) then you either get throttled within peak times (demon throttles you to 128kb ) or you get your contract cancelled.

The VM policy of only traffic shaping you when you go over a limt at peak times and only then for a single limited period is what brought me back to VM (I used to be on thier wireless DSL trial in south London many years back before I moved.

It's now been a month since I had VM installed and apart from a simple mistake (they put me on 2mb instead of the contracted 4mb but this was cleared up in 10 minutes on the phone) I must say I'm happy with the service, but then I had 6MB on DSL (dropping down to 2mb during peak) so I would have been happy staying with DSL apart from thier FUPs

Kymmy

[dave6x]

Personally I will find it much better as the majority of my downloading is after 21:00 anyway.

However I feel sorry for those family users who share Size L/4Mb/s with their children, they are really going to get a real ear-bending when the Draconian 1Mb above the 800MB STM threshold cuts in!!!!

[Toto]

Also, they do seem to be upfront about it. Like the policy or not, they are prepared to put it out there for public consumption.