Virgin upstream throttling angers gamers

So, Virgin have oversold bandwidth..

..and are now penalising customers for using it?

Nice.

Ofcom need to grow a pair and sort this out, otherwise we'll soon have ISP's telling us that emails to our great aunt sissy are "not critial" and won't be delivered until "off peak" whever they deem that to be.

Imagine you electricity dropping becase EDF decide "it's a bit busy". Would you swallow that? Why should ISPs be any different? They take our money, so cough up the service we pay for!

By cheysuli on 8 Mar 2011

HA

50mbps no throttling, have not received any change in terms of conditions at all. But we have been having huge problems with ping and packet loss and such, but that is because of a fault in the area, which they are taking 4 months to fix (started in January and they are going to fix that in April). VirginMedia should really just upgrade, they have the money and resources to do that, make use of that new technology that is around (have no clue what it is but surely there must be something that could meet the demand of current internet users) I am interested how exactly are they blocking newsgroups, the connection (ports) is used for other things as well, they can't just go and decrease service for it plus the traffic is SSL so they can't discriminate again some data.
and who shall we now compare them too!!!!
VirginMedia stop sucking Music and movie industry off by doing this and just concentrate on giving your customers the best service possible, like fixing out ping (just to say we had no problem of speed after 9pm until around 4-6pm, during those times on the other hand our ping averages around 600-1000 ms, which makes gaming impossible, surfing the internet unbearably slow and any activity that need internet intermittent. so fix this first VM and then do your shitty tests!!!!

By mobilegnet on 8 Mar 2011

oh

forgot to add around 10-35% packet loss during that period (4-6pm to 9 pm) as well, which is average a quarter of all data, what a joke!!!!

By mobilegnet on 8 Mar 2011

Define success?

I mean Virgin, really ...what is your definition of success when the point of the exercise is to limit the level and scope of the service you provide to, apparently, the broadest number of customers you currently serve?

(nb: you, Virgin, serve them, the customer ...it's not the other way round!)

By fingerbob69 on 8 Mar 2011

complaints persisted about World of Warcraft

Yes, yes they do.

By peterm2k on 8 Mar 2011

How can they advertise having the "fastest" connection speeds when its throttled like this?

I personally only get 4mbps a second on ADSL but I seem to have a better connection than VM customers are and I pay less per month for it (£14.08/m full price).

By tech3475 on 8 Mar 2011

@tech3475

To be honest Virgin are not the only ones throttling, BT and others have all done this, Actually Virgin is the only one which does not have any policies (except something use of connection, which basically mean you cannot download like 100 GB a day, Sky is now also emerging with similar thing with no throttling on their unlimited package, but speed comparison is the obvious point here Sky has 20mbps, while virgin is 50mbps, and moving to provide 100mbps to most of their fibre customers by 2014. While BT still has the "limit" on their unlimited packages which is complete BS and i hate every single ISP just because they advertise "unlimited" and then say but if you download during this time we will decrease your speed down 75% of what it is supposed to be!!!!!! (so technically it is unlimited but your speed just really really slow and they do say after this particular number of GB we will decrease your speed so limited then), i am sorry but that is not unlimited. Virgin Media 50mbps does not have any restriction other than that 100GB, but since most people do not download this much (with exception of me, DDD) i think they would find that this is better. But Virgin Media must upgrade their servers to tackle high utilization due to higher number of people signing up to 50mbps

and @fingerbob69 i totally agree "
(nb: you, Virgin, serve them, the customer ...it's not the other way round!)"

By mobilegnet on 8 Mar 2011

Success

Success in this trial is: how much was we throttle back before someone notices / complains

By DaChimp on 8 Mar 2011

@DaChimp

lol

By mobilegnet on 8 Mar 2011

Pretty twofaced Virgin....

...considering they are selling their products as 'the fastest in the UK'. I suppose that's right if you spend most of your surfing time in the small hours but to the majority of users completely false. Will Ofcom do anything? Of course not!

By everton2004 on 8 Mar 2011

It's not just upstream affected

I'm with Virgin and this now explains to me why my speed suddenly fell off a cliff starting last week.

In the evenings I used to average between about 1 - 1.2 Mbps (download, obviously) then according to speedtest.net, that suddenly slumped to 0.15Mbps - with a ping of 1055.

I don't use P2P services in the evenings, (iplayer, games or anything else) and I certainly don't come anywhere near a 100GB per month limit.

I'm out of contract, so if the trial continues I'll be going elsewhere.

Soon...

By Mr_John_T on 8 Mar 2011

@everton2004

You have evidence to support "majority of users"?

Ofcom's own survey supports VMs "fastest in the UK" as reported only a couple of days ago on here - http://www.pcpro.co.uk/news/broadband/365638/bt-in
finity-fibre-boasts-britains-fastest-uploads

By chapelgarth on 8 Mar 2011

Massive Fail

I remember not too long ago in World of Warcraft there was a massive thread on the forums to do with players and Virgin connections, we even had one in our guild complaining about it. In essence Blizzard uses P2P to distribute patch data thus it had all been flagged as P2P so when they eventually tried to play the game they got massive pings.

By Embattled on 8 Mar 2011

Massive Fail

I remember not too long ago in World of Warcraft there was a massive thread on the forums to do with players and Virgin connections, we even had one in our guild complaining about it. In essence Blizzard uses P2P to distribute patch data thus it had all been flagged as P2P so when they eventually tried to play the game they got massive pings.

By Embattled on 8 Mar 2011

@Mr_John_T

Are you sure you are not on the unadvertised 2Mbps S tier?

I've got to say I've no complaints with the speeds I've received from VM and its predecessors. Since upgrading to 30Mbps a month ago, speedtest.net has consistently reported 31.3Mbps - 31.7Mbps.

By chapelgarth on 8 Mar 2011

Hi chapelgarth,

No, I'm 100% certain I'm on the 8Mbps unlimited package, (I didn't even know there was a 2Mbps package). I originally joined them a number of years back on a 4Mbps deal, which later upgraded to 8Mbps - utterly pointless as I've never even been anywhere near 4Mbps.

On the very rare occasions I've stayed up till 2-3am I've managed to hit the heady heights of 2.6Mbps, but fast at 2am isn't really a lot of use in the real world is it?

I'd love a faster connection, and would be more than willing to pay for it, alas, I don't have the option where I live. Although looking at my local area map on top10.com, Virgin do seem to be the slowest around where I live by a fair margin - though like I say, the last week has gotten ridiculous. If the aim was to only affect upstream, I'd have to say they've failed miserably - in my area anyway.

It's like being thrown back to the dark old days of dial-up...

By Mr_John_T on 9 Mar 2011

Virgin Media are also very slow at fixing problems.

I suspect the throttled speeds they talk of will be 10 to 20 times faster than the ones I get during evenings and weekends.
Like some of the earlier posters I have had this fault for ages, approaching 6 months now with still no sign of a fix.
It took 2 time-outs and refreshes to get this page to appear, current packet loss is 46%.

By AnOptimist on 9 Mar 2011

It's all about UPLOAD speeds!

What everyone seems to have missed is that this ia all about Upload speeds, not Download speeds. Typically, Virgin's Upload speeds are just 5% of their download speeds; I get a measly 0.5Mbs upload on my 10Mbs download broadband connection.

Virgin have been promising an improvement on upload speeds for ages; Cloud computing will remain just a dream until practical upload speeds are delivered. Their website states that we will get our upgrade in March; Isn't it March now? Where's my upgrade Virgin?

By grahamft on 10 Mar 2011

Virgin Media sucks

I am an ex VM user - this came about because of throttling issues on my line. I provided VM with a graph of a months connectivity sampled every 10mins day and night which clearly indicated throttling was occuring; their response was "oh no sir we are not traffic shaping you connection" - a blatant lie!!!
Suffice to say I am a happy ex VM customer with NO throttling, traffic shaping or restricted downloads and very rare outages/slow ping times. My current ISP also has quite decent support when called upon; bravo BeThere!!
Long live VM - ha ha ha!!

By blobbyguts on 10 Mar 2011

Virgin Media sucks

I am an ex VM user - this came about because of throttling issues on my line. I provided VM with a graph of a months connectivity sampled every 10mins day and night which clearly indicated throttling was occuring; their response was "oh no sir we are not traffic shaping you connection" - a blatant lie!!!
Suffice to say I am a happy ex VM customer with NO throttling, traffic shaping or restricted downloads and very rare outages/slow ping times. My current ISP also has quite decent support when called upon; bravo BeThere!!
Long live VM - ha ha ha!!

By blobbyguts on 10 Mar 2011

BT Rolling out Fibre

Been a VM customer for a few years and now out of contract (monthly rolling contract). Service has become almost unusable this week and this explains why!

I play COD on the 360 and never had issues until recently with severe lag and being booted. My girlfriend has servere issues connecting with her MAC and thats just genreal web browsing! My PC has been on sonce 9.30pm all night last night trying to downlad Win XP updates and STILL at step 3 of 5 as of 10.30am this morning! Wil be saying to Virgin to sort it as it's certainly NOT my home network!

It's woth mentioning that BT are rolling out their fibre network around the Central Region in Scotland this year. So hopefully this will give VM a boot up the hoop they clearly need.

Last time i spoke to them about the poor level of service a young lad was quite cocky on the phone advising VM offer the fastest service in the area. Maybe so, but shaping traffic in this manner to the point VM are almost unusable, well, come BT day I can see a huge migration of customers! VM will feel this financially as its all about customer retention these days.

Lets hope BT offer some real fibre competition, something the UK clearly needs!

By Who_Knows on 10 Mar 2011

No problems

Well I guess it must depend on area. I've had no problems with a 10mb/1mb service and recently upgraded to he 50Mb/5mb service which gives me exactly that. I'm always one of the people with the lowest pings in game. The occasional faults have been repaired within the day.
Anyone no if issues correlate with state of infrastructure in a n area ie how far it is to be upgraded?

By overthere on 11 Mar 2011

VM throttling

Been experiencing upstream throttling for years with VM after 5pm Obviously such restrictions affect the downstream capability as well due to significant loss of packets. Overall capability reduced to less than 5% of advertised speed I pay for.
Just waiting for BTs fibre then I shall move across asap as affects my work connections.
Just waiting for BTs fibre then will move across asap.

By damian_kay on 11 Mar 2011