Virgin throttles Preston, but says it's for its own good

 

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By Barry Collins

Posted on 11 Feb 2009 at 14:59

Virgin Media is testing a new traffic management system on the poor folk of Preston, which sees customers' broadband connections throttled for longer if they overstep Virgin's download limits.

Virgin applies a blanket traffic management policy across the country that sees cable customers lose as much as 75% of their connection speed if they exceed daily download limits.

Under the current regime, Virgin only allows customers to download a set amount of data between 10am-3pm and 4pm-9pm, or else they have their connection throttled for five hours.

Virgin's Preston trial scraps the morning window on weekdays, but throttles the connection for up to seven hours if customers overstep the mark. All connections are restored to normal at 11pm, however, meaning those who are put on a speed limit at just before 9pm will only have their connection throttled for a couple of hours.

The Preston trialists are also subject to a new weekend window of 11am-9pm. Customers who breach the download limits face having their connection choked for up to 10 hours, although the curfew is again lifted at 11pm.

The new system means that a customer who downloads as little as 1,250MB - roughly three hour-long shows on BBC iPlayer - could find their connection speed halved for the best part of Saturday or Sunday.

Virgin, however, insists the good people of Preston are the lucky ones. "It's more lenient," a spokesman told PC Pro. "People can download more in a week than they could before."

"[Under the existing scheme] there can be up to two windows of five hours per day [where the connection was throttled] if someone was hammering their connection," he added.

Virgin says the new trial is designed to catch fewer people. "There are some significantly high [data] users, and those we do need to manage," he said.

Virgin's traffic management also places limits on the amount of data that can be uploaded.