80kbps!!!

[kin242]

Just got this email:

Hello there,

We’ve noticed recently that you’ve been using your Virgin Media Broadband connection to upload and download a lot more than we’d expect.

While we’re pleased that you’re enjoying using our broadband service, when someone downloads an unusually large amount of information over a long period of time, it can slow down the internet speed for other users. So, to make sure our service is fair for everybody, we’ll need to moderate the speeds of your service as mentioned in our Acceptable Use Policy.

If the amount that you’ve been downloading is affecting other Virgin Media users during peak times, we normally only reduce your speeds to 512Kbps for the rest of the day, and this is usually enough to help us make sure that everyone can enjoy a speedy broadband connection. But, if your use is higher than normal during the peak times of the week, and doesn’t seem to be getting any less even with the reduction to 512Kbps, we’ll eventually reduce your broadband speed during peak times to 80Kbps – and that’s for the rest of the week.

How this affects you
Because we have seen prolonged high usage on your account, we’ll be moderating the internet use during peak times for the rest of this week (until Sunday night).
This means that from 4pm to midnight from Monday to Friday, and 10am to midnight on Saturday and Sunday your broadband service will be 80Kbps (that’s just faster than a dial-up connection). During these times you might want to stagger your use, so that you’re not doing everything in one go. Outside of these times, you’ll be able to use your service as normal, with speeds of up to 8Mb. If you’d like to find out a bit more about why we do this just click here.

Keeping track of what you’re using
To avoid this happening again, you can cut down on the amount you’re downloading at peak times and, after Sunday, we’ll put things on your account back to normal. To help keep track on this, there are lots of handy tools available on the internet which can tell you how much you’re downloading over a specific period.
If the next time we look at our users we notice that you’re still downloading more than we’d expect, we’ll just apply the usage restrictions again and let you know what’s happening.

Want to know more about our Acceptable Use Policy? Just click here to read the whole thing.


The Virgin Media team

Nice of them. I'm absolutely furious!!! OK I do download some stuff- but I have an 8 Mb ADSL connection they charge me a fortune for because they havent cabled up my area yet! During peak time the connection speed averages about 100kbps anyway because the exchange is so overloaded...

What really ****es me off is the fact that there is absolutely no warning. If I knew my downloads were too high I would have paid more attention and downloaded everything off peak. In fact as far as I can see, I do dowload everything off peak! I download all my big stuff either in the early hours of the morning or before 10 am.

My connection is now buggered for the rest of the week. I'm not going to call them and complain as they'll just charge me for the pleasure of not actually doing anything anyway. They could have lowered it to something reasonable- this is outrageous! And furthermore, my son is not going to be able to play his online games with these crappy connections over half term!

I need to move to somewhere I can switch to some other provider- these clowns are truly abysmal.

[Stabhappy]

Why don't you get a different ADSL provider?

[CrowmanUK]

I had that too mate, bloody big pants when it cuts in, do what I did and move to Be

https://www.bethere.co.uk/

When it kicks in you cant even browse the net, it just slows to a complete crawl, it has to be the most limiting traffic management ever and even if you're 100% sure you havent downloaded anything in peak time they wont do a damn thing.

[Magilla]

I need to move to somewhere I can switch to some other provider- these clowns are truly abysmal.

It'd be a compliment to call them clowns.

As CrowmanUK says, Be have a good rep. I'm just in the process of moving over to them myself.

[kin242]

No other options- its still the same adsl line isnt it? So whoever I go to I get the same caps?

Its dire here anyway- during peak hours I never get a decent connection. Supposed to be 8mbps, but its 6 at the very best, and thats only between 1 am and 6 am. The rest of the time it rarely tops 500 kbps, often 100kbps (weekends and peak).

Bethere dont do my area- tanks though.

[Axegrinder]

80kbps? How do they get away with throttling that much????:erm:

[chickendippers]

Virgin Media's traffic management policy is unique to them. Different ADSL providers have different policies. Eg. PlusNet (http://www.plus.net/myreferrals/new.html?w645oK3%2FCguHYxTpF%2BrJmYMH0UyY3eFbAPq9X c9vSA4%3D) have a limit during the day, but at night you can download as much as you like, plus you can track exactly how much you download on their website.

Your BT line will limit the maximum speed you can receive as well as the capacity at your exchange, on any provider - but the policies are specific to each ISP.

[Matth]

Never understood why anyone would use VM for ADSL, there are better, there are cheaper, there are cheaper and better.

http://www.samknows.com/broadband/search.php
Check to see which providers have LLU prescence, you will ONLY get a decent deal if they have LLU.

Sky claim to have no limits on Sky max - £10 pm on top of a sky subscription.

[kin242]

Only LLU is talktalk - are they any worse/better? Also I get myTV fromsky but they dont do cable broadband in my area...

[moaningmags]

Only LLU is talktalk - are they any worse/better? Also I get myTV fromsky but they dont do cable broadband in my area...

Only Virgin do cable broadband. Sky should be able to give you adsl as it comes through you're phone line.

[kin242]

Do sky or talk talk do the same kind of traffic limiting crap though? Or at least do they warn you before doingthis kind of stunt?

I'm quite amazed at this-my wife rang them up and they said they would cut us off if it happens again. SO WHAT? THE SERVICE IS AWFUL!

---------- Post added at 23:14 ---------- Previous post was at 22:57 ----------

Just foundits actually a 5Gb per week fair usage limit. If you pass it once you get limited for a week. Twice and its for a month.

So my download limit is now less than 20Gb per month.

A couple of steam games, some patches, a bit of BBC Iplayer, and thats it.


How the hell can they expect to keep their customers? I'm going to switch to sky or talktalk.

[BenMcr]

Sky claim to have no limits on Sky max - £10 pm on top of a sky subscription.
But you can't get Sky Max everywhere - only if they are in your exchange

Do sky or talk talk do the same kind of traffic limiting crap though? Or at least do they warn you before doingthis kind of stunt?
If you can't get Sky LLU they have hard limit of 40Gb a month - £17 a month for a 8Mbit line

http://www.sky.com/portal/site/skycom/skyproducts/broadband/pricesandoptions/connect

TalkTalk also have a 40Gb limit - but you can pay it increase it to 80Gb
http://www.talktalk.co.uk/products/broadband/essentials

[kin242]

No sky LLU, its only talktalk on our exchange. And they want an 18 month contract but we'll probably move in 6months and hopefully go cable, so I dont want to sign up for that.

:mad:

[nutellajunkie]

I dont know why folk moan about it this sort of stuff..

Seriously, it doesn't take a genius to install a bandwidth monitor, or have your router do it for you.

People who say things like I didn't realise I downloaded that much, then actually admit you download that much..

Seriously, if you don't like the services, then use someone else. We aint in the dark ages. However, I do think its appalling that they would cap you to 80k, surely this is a case for ofcom? Ever with over-subscription, 80k is a P-take.

Happy hunting for a new supplier :P

[CrowmanUK]

The reason people moan about this kind of stuff is because as the OP said, he was sure he did any downloading outside peak time, I also downloaded outside of peak hours and there is no way you can dispute it, you get the old "you downloaded x amount between these hours, end of story". I was even out on one of the days that I supposedly downloaded 7 gig ish during peak times and the router wasnt on so their monitoring software must be bugged to high hell. A reasonable cap would be fair enough but to throttle to dial up speeds for a week during peak hours is just a joke.
The 5gig limit was mentioned to me when I was going through my hell but if you check the fair use policy it says "So to make sure our service is fair for everybody, we sometimes moderate the speeds for the top 5% of customers who are downloading and/or uploading an unusually large amount." 5%, not 5gig which is what you will be told if you push the customer support enough they'll admit to.
Originally with ADSL it was knocked down to 512kbps which wouldnt have been too bad but they've really screwed it down now.

[Ignitionnet]

I dont know why folk moan about it this sort of stuff..

Seriously, it doesn't take a genius to install a bandwidth monitor, or have your router do it for you.

People who say things like I didn't realise I downloaded that much, then actually admit you download that much..

And what use is having a bandwidth monitor when you don't actually know what that limit would be?

OP wasn't actually told what the limit was and even when they mentioned it to him they were somewhat economical with the truth. It's not a hard limit it's whatever usage puts you in the top few% of the customer base - tad hard to monitor and moderate usage when you've no idea what's considered acceptable:

Each day we monitor how much data our customers download during the peak times of the day. We measure this on a Kilobytes (KB) downloaded per hour basis. This allows us to identify the small number of customers who are trying to download excessive amounts of data over a small period of time and the even smaller number of people who are downloading vast amounts of data constantly during peak times. Both types of behaviour can be at the detriment of service to the vast majority of the Virgin Media customers. We reserve the right to traffic manage these customers during peak times using one of the following policies depending on the behaviour of the customers in question.

To ensure that all customers receive the appropriate level of service at peak times we will limit customers who have downloaded an excessive amount of data during a one hour period of the peak time frame. These customers will be limited on a one off basis to 512Kbit/s for the remainder of the peak period for that day. The peak period is from 4pm to midnight during the week and 10am till midnight at the weekend.

For the small number of customers who constantly download excessive amounts of data (around 2% of our customers), our traffic management solution will temporarily set download speeds to no lower than 80Kbit/s. This limit is applied daily, 4pm until midnight, for one week. In the same week during off-peak periods our traffic management solution will automatically reset download speeds back to their full speed and no traffic management will be applied.

Each week we review our heaviest peak-time users over the previous 7 days. We then update the refreshed customer list to our servers for traffic shaping. This should mean a customer does not have their traffic managed for two consecutive weeks.