What is the correct traffic management\peak hours?

[Dave9946]

I'm assuming this has changed some time ago because everyong seems to think it's 9am to 9pm for all. A warning letter says 9am to 9pm to so I'd assume that it's correct from what I can tell. But the information on the traffic management page on virgin still has (for downloading) for all but the 2mb speed 9-3pm then 4-9pm. With morning and afternoon having seperate qutoas with a better quota in the morning\afternoon than for the evening with the 3-4pm still seemingly showing as a "happy hour" for downloading but restricted for uploading.

Is that page therefor outdated?, is it still correct?. If not is there another, new page someone can post with the correct dated information, thanks.

[pip08456]

The "happy hour" still exists and has nothing to do with overall usage. All it means as any download during that time is not counted for STM purposes.

The warning letter asks you to reduce the overall amount you download during those hours.

P2P and newsgroups traffic shaping lasts until midnight.

[japitts]

P2P and newsgroup traffic shaping?

Excuse my ignorance but I don't recall seeing this mentioned anywhere on the VM site. Must have missed it - certainly don't notice it!

[Dave9946]

You do have to laugh at virgins policy with reguard to newsgroups. They offer free access yet dont like you using that free access during the day by the sounds of things. And they dont even mention any restrictions that I can see when you get the info of setting up the newsgroups access off the virgin site lol.

[General Maximus]

And they dont even mention any restrictions that I can see when you get the info of setting up the newsgroups access off the virgin site lol.

Excuse my ignorance but I don't recall seeing this mentioned anywhere on the VM site. Must have missed it - certainly don't notice it!

Virgin media throttle all traffic during peak hours on all tiers up to 50mb which can be seen here:

http://shop.virginmedia.com/help/traffic-management/traffic-management-faster-uploads.html

Note that 50mbit is not throttled downstream but is throttled upstream. 100mbit is not throttled at all.

Despite this, VM also take measures to reduce the impact p2p traffic has on their network during peak time. This isn't throttling because they are not reducing your connection speed by x%, they make p2p traffic low priority on the network so you get whatever bandwidth which is left. My newsgroups and torrents have gone from as abad as 80k/sec up to 1.2mbit. It all depends what the traffic on the network is like at the time. You can seem VM's policy here:

http://shop.virginmedia.com/help/traffic-management/traffic-management-policy.html

File sharing

"We moderate the total volume of file sharing traffic on our network between 5pm and midnight on weekdays and midday and midnight on weekends. This policy, which applies to all broadband packages, is restricted to Peer to Peer ("P2P") applications and Newsgroups (which are commonly used to distribute large amounts of data)

This policy does not impact any applications other than Peer to Peer and Newsgroups, so things like watching iPlayer, online gaming, making calls via Skype, downloading music tracks from iTunes or streaming them from Spotify and sending an email or normal browsing are unaffected.

It's important to remember that these traffic management policies only apply at peak times when speeds are most likely to be affected by people using more than their fair share. Outside of peak times we do not manage traffic."