Page 1 of Even more Virgin speed throttling now..

>:(
Now we`ll be throttled between 10:00 - 15:00 AND 16:00 - 21:00.. So after a very short space of time in downloading you could have your speed cut by 75% for 10 hours a day... And they still say `unlimited`.. >:(
Discussed here.
Official here..

Ste

It annoys me this. Fair enough have a peak time but how have they figured out that 10am - 3pm is peak time? Isn`t most of the country at work then? I have all my download software stop between their `other` peak time of 4pm - 9pm. At what speed would you have to download for five hours to download 2.5gb?

Why increase speeds for customers but then only allow us to take advantage of them for a few hours a day - it now means I will have to leave my PC on through the night and not the day (at least electricity is cheaper at night).

I thought fibre networks could take almost any amount of traffic. Is Virgin`s network really that flakey that they can`t take he fact their customers want to use it?

I suppose you can do what you want when you have a monopoly.

Nick

As far as heavy downloading goes it just means that you need to do it overnight starting at say 7 or 8 pm so as to not reach your respective limit by 9pm.

Hopefully the OH won`t use my limit working from home over Citrix between 10- 3 now though... :/

M.

Quote:
As far as heavy downloading goes it just means that you need to do it overnight starting at say 7 or 8 pm so as to not reach your respective limit by 9pm.But you can reach your limit in 1/2 an hour..... Nevermind when they introduce 50Mb.... :/

Ste

Barstewards

May consider leaving Virgin

NEW ! "VARIABLE SPEED UNLIMITED!!""

WTF???? £37 for what exactly?

If my speed is not 20Mb for most of the day, how can they charge me £37? Because they can.




My DVD collection

Doesn`t this mean their service is now limited. If you can only download 3.26gb between 10am and 9pm then surely that counts as being limited?

Nick

Quote:
NEW ! "VARIABLE SPEED UNLIMITED!!""

That sounds like an advert for an Ann Summers product...
---
You got us into this parking lot pal, you can get us out!

This won`t really affect me as 9GB is enough for me during those hours (I`ve been slowed down about twice only on the 3GB evening allowance), but I don`t like it one bit. I prefer the idea to a monthly limit, but that`s about the only thing going for it.

If it *was* true that it was only a small percentage of users were breaking the limits in the evenings, and that lowering the speed for these users, then the problem would be solved and it wouldn`t be necessary to start daytime limits.

If the contentment of the "average" user was *really* the issue here, and "very heavy" users were slowed or scheduling their larger downloads to other times resulting in congestion in the day, then STM wouldn`t be required either because the "average user" will be at work or school and completely unaffected by this. The heavy users would be unaffected as well as their downloads would surely still be done by the time they got home regardless of any sluggishness.

I also think the allowances on the lower tiers are ridiculous, a user getting 350MB of files nowadays is by no means a heavy user, and I don`t believe for a second that those who do comprise only a small and greedy minority of the 2Mb customers.

I don`t like how it`s become over-complicated, and how it`s creeping towards a daily pre-punishment allowance - if traffic in the daytime when everyone`s out is causing problems for users how long until the traffic used while everyone`s asleep will be deemed to as well?

I don`t want to leave cable as it`s the best for my needs and I`m getting a very good deal, but I would NOT recommend them now unless the person had very particular needs like wanting newsgroups included - even then they might be better off with O2 and a pre-paid newsgroup account or a subscription - or they were far away from the exchange.

OT but still indicative of how not-cuddly NTL are compared to how Telewest were is that the VM boss is against Network Neutrality. Oh and let`s not forget about Phorm.


Quote:
If you can only download 3.26gb between 10am and 9pm then surely that counts as being limited?

You can only download that amount *at full speed*, the actual amount of data you can get is not limited by anything other than the speed. The maximum amount you can download in a day works out like this (ish):

(XL package, speeds are based on the max I get from the VM news servers so it`s a theoretical best-case scenario if you really decided to hammer it)

00:00 - 10:00 = 86GB (unmetered)
10:00 - 10:50 = 6GB (then in the punishment speed for 5 hours)
10:50 - 15:50 = 11GB
15:50 - 16:00 = 1.4 GB (What`s left of Happy Hour)
16:00 - 16:25 = 3GB (then back in the leper colony)
16:25 - 21:25 = 11GB
21:25 - 00:00 = 23GB (unmetered)

So 141.4GB per day as a maximum, whereas a truly unlimited service would be 207GB per day.

So for the lowest tier it would be around:
00:00 - 10:00 = 7.2GB
10:00 - 10:50 = 900MB
10:50 - 15:50 = 1.8GB (2Mb customers aren`t penalised as harshly)
15:50 - 16:00 = 60MB
16:00 - 16:25 = 450MB
16:25 - 21:25 = 1.8GB
21:25 - 00:00 = 1.7GB

= 13.64GB vs 17.28GB

Obviously nobody can actually use the full amount in practice, but the figures should help you have an idea of what to expect in the evenings and in the day during weekends and school holidays.

Upload allowance has to be worked into it too for evenings only but it`s too hard for my poor brain today. It also gets messed up if you trigger the penalty less than 5 hours before midnight as that will mean the slow speed with continue after and will eat into the amount you can get overnight at top speed.



www.soundalikes.com ~*~ glitterkat.stumbleupon.com

it really doens`t look to be so bad when you show the charts like that, i think it`s down to time management a little, the unmetered slot 00.00 - 10.00 leaves plenty of usage.

I`m a bit peeved by the minuscule allowance between 4pm - 9pm as i`m only on 2mb service being a pauper and all and my kids can cain this on iPlayer etc....although having said that in fairness and i`m sure everyone knows that if you press the red button on a BBC channel with VM it now brings up the iPlayer service so that alleviates some of the strain of recent months.

I`m stuck with VM until Jan 09 having accepted a good value package deal so not much i can do about it but suck it and see for now... :/

M.