Virginmedia's new traffic management policy

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

At least you are not with Sky who are terrible.

[jim]

They have increased the prices so its not a free upgrade, 50mbit (100mbit soon) old price £34.75, new price £37.50.

Yes, that did make me laugh.

"Hey everyone, you can all have a free upgrade."

"Hey everyone, we're putting our prices up."

But of course, they're completely unrelated.

[jonathan_phang]

Still waiting for my upgrade from 30 to 60, but will have to see how the service goes from there. I'm pretty sure that somewhere on the traffic management page it says that the limits are for p2p traffic only.

Do services like steam or origin count as p2p? Never really been sure. If indeed the limits are p2p then would be good to get examples of what sorts of things do or don't count.

Sorry for the rubbish question!!!

[Krono5]

I absolutely detest traffic management. If they can't provide the service so people downloading/uploading at their maximum speeds don't interfere with their neighbours speeds then they should stick to whatever speed they can give to everyone at the same time. Instead of increasing speeds to 100Mb they should be working on improving line quality.

[Jay]

If they did that the cost of broadband would be huge.

Vm do 100Mbps contended at about £40 a month, a 1:1 100Mbps line is about £1300 a month.

We would all be back down to 1 and 2Mbps

[Agent]

At least you are not with Sky who are terrible.

I just left them for Infinity, but Sky had no traffic management when I was there and always provided a good service.

What's so bad about them?

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

I just left them for Infinity, but Sky had no traffic management when I was there and always provided a good service.

What's so bad about them?

Sky broadband CS is useless. We are on Sky Unlimited and the interchange can do 7MBPS+ and even their own checker it says 7MBPS to 14MBPS.

Guess what we get?? Just under 2MB.

For the last two years,everytime we phone up they do some BS and the speed rises for all of a week and then it seems on the nearest Sunday the speed reverts to ****e(seems the router gets a request from Sky and it suddenly drops down). We have just given up with the amount of times we have had to ring their technical supprt.

Last time we were getting near enough 7MBPS for all of 10 days.

They are just a load of scamming scum and since if it was my connection I would have ditched them yonks ago.

I will never ever go with Sky if it was my own connection - I have had much better experience even with Virgin and even flipping Tiscali in shared houses.

People in our immediate area have Virgin and they much higher speeds than us.

Sky can stick their fibre up where the sun does not shine.

http://forums.hexus.net/networking-b...ml#post2429117

Just effing excuses for the last few years and the most incompetent technical services of any broadband provider I have ever experienced. The internet on my phone is nearly as fast as our land connection. What they do is usually is increase the speed when we(basically me) rings them up and within a week to 10 days,it drops(always on a Sunday night and I can see a connection from Sky in the router logs which coincides with this). Their useless DLM in action I believe.

Maybe instead of boasting about BS 40MB crap,they should try getting the rest of their network working at better than pre-historic speeds. I live in the South East, not somewhere in the middle of nowhere.

The internet speed is barely enough to use iPlayer SD and I am the one who uses the internet the most and I barely download anything. Maybe once a month I might download a Steam game overnight,or play an online game sometimes. but in many cases I tend to buy games on disc.

The only thing good about the connection is the ping which is decent,so we have just left it at that. At some point we might go onto VM even with their traffic management.

[Dareos]

Traffic management policy will be changing again soon, affecting 30 Meg and up, its better all round and only affects you for 1 or 2 hours depending on which download threshodl you break, not sure when it goes live

[Barrichello]

Traffic management policy will be changing again soon, affecting 30 Meg and up, its better all round and only affects you for 1 or 2 hours depending on which download threshodl you break, not sure when it goes live

I am currently on the 10mb service (so being moved to 20mb about July) do these new limits/management only affect 30mb and over? so i will still get 75% traffic management instead?

[Unique]

Traffic management policy will be changing again soon, affecting 30 Meg and up, its better all round and only affects you for 1 or 2 hours depending on which download threshodl you break, not sure when it goes live

where did you see this?

[Smudger]

I think Dareos works for VM...

[g8ina]

Anyone got any idea how I get them to give me a standard new hub for 30Mb (not going to 60Mb till Oct 2012 minimum)?

Im on 20Mb with the old modem plus D-Link router. I seem to remember them telling me there was a one off 30 quid fee for it, but I cant find it anywhere on their pages now.

[Dareos]

Dave, dont mate, just dont hehe

The superhub is still problematic, stick with your modem as long as you can. Rumours around the water cooler suggest that the new Shub deal has fallen through as someone on the manufacturers end made a booboo and couldnt live up to the promises they made within budget given, this is only hearsay tho and I have nothing to back this statement up. The current shub isnt a great design and if you do get one then modem mode is the only way to go with a 3rd party router (i currently use the standard VM Dlink one, pings are still higher than they were with my old modem, but not much more, so ok on that front).

Barichello, the link on the first post should still apply, those tiers of service remain the same for the moment

Unique, I saw them in the powerpoint presentation I was given earlier



I was given some pretty hard facts and figures as far as what traffic management will take place, at what times, and some rough figures as to which percentage of VM customers this will affect on a regular basis. As its not live yet and not on the VM website I dont really want to go into too much detail as its all subject to change until it goes live.

However, TM will now only last for 1 hour or 2 hours depending on whether you break a glass ceiling in download amount within a set period of time. As it used to be around 7GB per 10am-3pm period on a 30Mb connection I can safely say that its a lot higher threshold, its now only 50% reduction at the first threshold and as it lasts for a far shorter time, then its a better deal all round.

Sadly traffic management is a necessary evil, internet traffic is ever increasing and in order to keep a network operating then limits have to be imposed. I was reading recently that even though South Korea have a national average of 16.7Mbps against our 4.7Mbps, they have far more stringent limits concerning downloading, torrenting and streaming as their networks are struggling to cope with the traffic.

I wish we didnt need it, but for everyone to get a fair bite at the internet cherry, its very much the way things are going.


Jay, excellent post mate, thats pretty much what would happen.

Jonathan Phang, all internet traffic is traffic managed on virgin, but p2p stuff can be traffic shaped, which is a different thing.

[Terbinator]

Another drop-out tonight.

[Dareos]

PM me your mac addy mate and I will check it out tomorrow

[Vimeous]

I'm confused by all the moaning. Even capped performance for top customers runs rings round 99% of competitors at their full speed.
Ok so you don't like it and want to move - but where too?
You feel your service has been mis-sold but since when isn't "subject to change" or something similar always in the small print, we just hope it's never actioned?
Sadly the grass isn't always greener as Cat points out.

The only thing that peeves me is the ridiculously low limits for infringement on 10Mb connections like mine followed by a overly zealous cap. I'm not unhappy the limits exist, they're expected but I can't update WOW at a weekend without bouncing off the cap of 750Mb. And as for xbox game addons - become nocturnal or leave the thing on all night which is not ideal.

And yet where else offer the same constant speeds without some other gotcha clause? There's precious little so despite my moans I'll happily live with it until the competition pulls their collective fingers out and offers a genuine alternative.