Is Virgin Media traffic shaping now?!?

[tfboy]

Hmm.

Tonight my 20Mb VM is very flaky and horribly slow. When I say horribly slow, I mean to the tune of the speed of a 28.8kbps modem, i.e. 2-3kBps

Interestingly, I did have my torrent client open, althought the bandwidth used was negligeable (about 20kBps up and down).

If I close this whilst downloading a file via http for example, my speed then shoots up from 2-3 kbytes/s to over 1MB/s

As soon as I open up torrets again, the speed drops to aforementioned slow speeds.

I've looked at my router (Linksys jobby running HyperWRT firmware) and the load is under 5% so can't see it being the router struggling to manage the TCP connections.

Is it traffic shaping? I've never experienced this before, and before I was upgraded from 10 to 20Mbit a month or two ago, things have been flying. I seem to remember NTL quoting that their 10Mbit connection was uncapped and not throttled in any way. I guess that's no longer the case VM have taken over?

Any ideas?

[Agent]

There is capping, but I dont know about shaping.

[BUFF]

VM don't have a cap in terms of download size but they do manage traffic
http://allyours.virginmedia.com/html...t/traffic.html

They don't seem to be having a good day service wise though ...
http://status-cable.virginmedia.com/vmstatus/summary.do

[DratUK]

Oh yes, nowt but problems.
I have VM 20Mb and yep if you hit that 3Gb download between 4 and midnight bang down to 5Mb. Funny though all the moans and complaints about the traffic shaping, yet according to a recent survey most people are lucky to hit 6Mb on ADSL..
Your problem is not associated with the traffic shaping and is more likely a local issue.



Torrents is one reason for the traffic shaping as it hogs upload bandwidth.

Since the upgrade to 20Mb the status page is full of problems. Hvaing said that I appear to be one of the lucky ones with very little outage.


It might help rather than speaking to some person overseas to post on the virginmedia newsgroup support

virginmedia.support.broadband.cable

You will get a far faster response than on the phone.

If you havent set up your newsgroup client this may help.

http://www.digitalspy.co.uk/forums/s...d.php?t=630696

[tfboy]

Hmm I guess it must have just been congestion as all appears to be fine again, even with torrents running.

I did some testing when I first got the 20Mb upgrade and could pretty much keep full download bandwidth if I capped my upload to about 80kbytes/sec. If I leave upload bw unlimited, it peaks at about 90kbytes/sec but has a massive impact on download performance.

The issues I had earlier weren't going over 20kbytes/sec upload. Now it appears to be averaging over 40 (I've throttled it a bit), yet web browsing is fine.

I suppose it must have been a local technical glitch as it all seems ok again. But it is strange how a minimum amount of traffic seems to have an exponential impact on performance elsewhere. Hmm

[DratUK]

Hi M8 just amended my post with the support newsgroup might help in future

[Agent]

VM don't have a cap in terms of download size but they do manage traffic
http://allyours.virginmedia.com/html...t/traffic.html

Well if I download X meg in Y hours and my speed gets changed, thats being capped as far as im concerned

[Gr44]

So am I to believe the flyer I got through the door with a certain famous actress looking like shes taken a ride in an F-15, in an attemp to 'show' how fast the virgin media cable connections are.... to be FALSE?!

Crikey.... what's the world coming too : )

Change ISP to be honest. I hear nothing but bad news from VM customers.... NTL were never *great* but.... even they seemed better.

I'd go with BT or BE personally.... depending on what you want from a package.

[SuicidaL]

alot of it is down to the network and over-subscription on the ubr's. as for the shaping/capping this is thanks to the monkeys that have hacked modems and steal bandwidth and the pimps who whore the bandwidth 24/7.

my gaming ping does suffer sometimes with minor packet loss - but this is more to do with how my connection is run through the network, but that said my connection on giganews is usually rock solid at 16-18meg and i've found the best time to d/l is 6-9 in the morning as ppl who set d/l overnight have finished and if you go over the 3gb cap then you don't get shafted.


and as for a faster response on the phone , it won't happen for the following

1. tech support is no longer free as it's now changed to a 0907bloody number

2. the bombay script munchers actually learn to listen to people, instead of using the 'network issue' or it's 'your pc' or 'an engineer is required', learnt from experience.


rant over.

[BUFF]

Well if I download X meg in Y hours and my speed gets changed, thats being capped as far as im concerned

if it was a cap it would be a hard cut off ...
VM aren't putting a limit on how much that you can download, just the speed that you can do it at (don't you love technicalities? ).

[chunut]

They insist they don't shape traffic, but I'm virtually certain they do... a plethora of posters over at DigitalSpy Computing&Networks have posted their experiences of the same. It seems Virgin just isn't willing to admit it...

[aidanjt]

If the traffic was being shaped you'd be much better off, perhaps you should *insist* that VM implements traffic shaping for more fair QoS, either that or demand that they acquire more backbone bandwidth.