Virgin Media Throttling - Moving House and considering changing ISP

[Dareos]

Good to know Jetfire, glad its sorted mate

Watercooled, again PM me your mac and I'll happily check it out, i work for an outsourced company providing support for VM.

We still have no info on XBL being managed in anyway though, checked up on it today, there may have been some byproduct of the traffic shaping system (not management, thats different) affecting the gaming system, but certainly not intentional. Can't say I have been affected myself on anything other than warcraft and that gets fixed then breaks again as Blizzard change the way they do things on their end too.

Problem is, and I see it every day, is that one person gets affected by something, shouts about it, and then everyone has it, even though they haven't actually tested for it. Its not just common to computers and Virgin, ask any GP You'd be amazed at the amount of people screaming for engineers because the net has gone down again, only to hang up shamefaced when you point out that the cable should be in the modem socket, not lan 1, 2, 3 or 4 on the router, especially after they strenuously deny having touched it.

Still, thats the public, I daresay I have had my moments as a customer too.

One thing I will say, that network is a living breathing thing, its different every day and affected differently every day. I can get a fix on a problem from 2nd line one day and it works, go back the next with the same issue because the same fix didnt work twice and another tech sorts it a different way. Its a network cobbled together from different original suppliers who had their own maintenance system in place and Virgin are slowly trying to pull it all together under one system, and thats like herding cats.

Personally I would like to see a gaming bundle where downloading is capped (torrents not allowed at certain times at all) but no traffic shaping takes place, but would be nigh on impossible to implement I think.

[watercooled]

Oops for some reason I assumed Zap was you replying - I'll blame lack of sleep. Post edited to correct.

I have nothing against throttling P2P file sharing considering what it's normally used for but it shouldn't be at the expense of usability of real-time applications.

Oh I get completely what you mean, and it probably explains most of the complaints found on Google - nothing to do with WiFi passing through 5 walls, it has to be the ISP. I recently had some trouble convincing a friend to use a wired connection - he assured me WiFi wasn't causing the problem - until he tried...

I've certainly posted my fair share of comments I've not thought through properly, especially in text you have to try to think of every way it could be interpreted, I've accidentally started flame wars purely through bad wording, and explaining yourself usually doesn't help.

Yup, TBH when the network is having a good day it's like playing on a LAN with my friends across the country using VM. Or, it can be like this yet at the same time, peering can be flaky and it's easy to tell who's not on VM. Then there can be bad days obviously but thankfully they seem to be getting rarer lately.

I know a lot of people who would like to see that, but I suppose offering an ISP/package for gaming would take a lot of work and mean some tough criteria would have to be met to keep customers satisfied.

[Bunjiweb]

Thanks for the additional posts covering throttling - I'm still a little concerned by the comments that Youtube or iPlayer doesn't play smoothly... I've used Youtube's "Leanback" service every night this week on my tablet and wouldn't want to have issues with playback.

Still a bit confused by it all to be fair, but probably will end up getting VM.

Ben

[pipTheGeek]

...
We still have no info on XBL being managed in anyway though, checked up on it today, there may have been some byproduct of the traffic shaping system (not management, thats different) affecting the gaming system, but certainly not intentional. Can't say I have been affected myself on anything other than warcraft and that gets fixed then breaks again as Blizzard change the way they do things on their end too.
...
Personally I would like to see a gaming bundle where downloading is capped (torrents not allowed at certain times at all) but no traffic shaping takes place, but would be nigh on impossible to implement I think.

I have nothing against throttling P2P file sharing considering what it's normally used for but it shouldn't be at the expense of usability of real-time applications.

Of course, the problem is that P2P writers became wise to ISP's applying QoS to their traffic, so they added encryption. Now, the network can't tell what the traffic is, all the P2P apps use different ports and the ISP's have a problem. It appears that VM's solution is to whitelist the traffic they can identify and limit the rest. This means that any application that isn't on their list is going to be thorttled. While I don't like this method of traffic management, (and I think it would be nicer if VM were a little more open about this) I do have sympathy for VM. Ideally people would stop the excessive use of P2P and VM would stop having to apply any QoS to their network. (Other than maybe giving priority to voip, iPlayer etc...)

[ShavedApe]

Im with VM and have been since well cable and wireless days actually ive tried others but for me there is only one choice as I am so far from the exchange adsl in all its forms the speeds are useless apart from infinity which I havent yet tried so cant comment on.

VM has always been pretty good ive had the odd issue here and there but nothing major and it usually gets sorted out, throttling is at peak times only but lasts I believe upto five hours so if you want to use torrents schedule them to start after 12am all other traffic is fine and even when throttled I have been able to game quite happily as that traffic is not throttled.
I am now on the 100mb service and have no real complaints currently testing the beta firmware r29 for there superhub which includes bridge mode for me so far no problems at all.

[Dareos]

ooh, tell me more about Bridge mode mate, hoping that this solves all kinds of issues , I want the 100 Mb myself but area won't be upgraded for some time yet, maybe early next year.

[Andi-C]

Super Hub Sux !

I'm needin the new FW for the brigde setting !!!