Branson backs down on piracy

"Repeat infringers might face speed bumps, meaning that their Internet transfer speed could be decreased significantly."

This already happens - my 20meg connection is significantly capped during peak times at times my download speed has reduced to 300-400kbs whereas it should be approx 2000kbs (although i only actually get approx. 1200kbs). I used to rate Virgin very highly but these stupid caps that are imposed and the fact that i only get half of the download speed I am supposed to has made me seriously think about switching to dsl

i believe that VM is not owned by Virgin, they just pay to use the name.

Cable is a shared medium.
At peak times, all the bandwidth is shared.
Theres probably 100Mbits/s for all of your area, or 100Mb/s maybe, but when everyone is online, its normal for your bandwidth to drop.
If a neighbour DL's also, you are having half each, etc...

DSL, or ADSL, or SDSL is NOT shared.
It just depends how far you are from the last link on the ISP circuit.
Over 5Kms, and you get 1Mbit
I'm almost on the limit, 4km odd, and I get 2.5Mbit.
It does mention that I can have up to 24Mbit, if I live very close.
A friend of mine who is less than 1Km from the ISP last link is at 10Mbits/s, but he hasn't gone for the large 24Mbit, he originally signed for a standard Internet ADSL connection.

Virgin Media will cap you if you breach their fair usage policy, which is staggered in roughly several-hour periods from around 0900-1500, 1500-2100, and 2100-0900. If you download over a threshold which is calculated based on your connection speed, you're capped to a small percentage of your bandwidth for the rest of that period. They don't seem to care after 9pm, so I keep my traffic low until then.

The contention ratio for Virgin cable is awful, it's about 200:1, so even without heavy downloading my bandwidth is rarely higher than the capped levels throughout the day, though at least it seems to pick up after 9.

I'm considering moving to another service provider, but it seems Virgin are the fastest for the money in the area, and to be fair cable really has proved much faster and more reliable than my old ADSL connections, which were universally shoddy and slow.

ED6, DSL may provide you with an unshared link to the ISP, but after you reach the ISP's network, your traffic is inserted into the same shared ISP network as all the other users. The fact that Cable traffic is shared right from the beginning usually doesn't matter since so much of the rest of the network is shared.

No matter what your theoretical maximum link speed to your ISP, and even if the ISP's network isn't overloaded, you are still limited by the shared upload speed of the server that is supplying your data. For example, if a server has a 24 Mbps upload capacity and two clients, there is no way both clients can download at 24 Mbps at the same time whether they have DSL or not. The internet is shared, no matter how you connect to it.

This is why i just payed BT £120 to put a line in!!! I am 3rd floor up so i dont mind paying so much as there is actually some work to do! I've persoanlly gone with O2 broadband as i get upto 20MB download and 2.5MB upload. Real world i get 12-14MB with max of 2MB upload.

Still, beats the 2.5MB download and 256K upload that i seemed to always get with virgin on the 10MB down/756K up because of there capping. Only time i saw anything close to that was between 1am & 7am. A whole 6 hours!!!

Only pay £17 a month now too apposed to £35 for virgin so the £120 wont take long to recuperate :)

A life without caps, Loving it :)

Ian

kbs? Mbps? Mbits/s? Mb/s?
Km? Kms?
And K, MB, Mbit or meg as transfer rate?

You funny people deserve what you get from Virgin!

As all know, Ye Ole [Whiter-than-] White Beard is merely a front - he'll cuddled-up to anything that breeds munay. What VM is threatening to do had been defacto for yonks except it's "Oh So" gymnastically termed as "Fair Use Policy" for those on IP Stream. Of all the ISPs, VM is the most promiscuous when it comes to T&C diarrhea - as evinced by the soreness of many a victims' end-users' gluteus maximus. Looks like Beardie's also a joker, amongst many of his talents.

I download 1 MEGABYTE a second quite happily from virgin, whenever I need it, never been capped, never seen it drop despite lots of hectic usage and its only £17pm as part of my package.

If you don't like your service, quit and choose another - just stop moping about it.

Whats the point of limiting upload speed, virgin media has the lowest upload speed in UK (speedtest.net results) I think that limiting it wont make them stop downloading -.-

Mantis

Who'll notice the difference? As a net gamer i have the audacity to download patches for my games using my VM connection and VOIP, frequently 800 mb+. The only time I can set these off is when I'm home from work, which falls foul of Virgin media's capping policy. Best part is some of these patches are only available via Bit Torrent with any reliable speed. (Apparently this is a big no-no for VM, their CEO recently stated some nonsense about bit torrent being the source of all copyright infringement evil. It's used to carry legitimate traffic too).

If Virgin Media relaxed throttling on the rest of us, and only throttled mass downloading copyright infringers, this might make a difference. All this amounts too is an admission that they'll treat 'pirates' the same as the rest of their paying customers with lousy service.

News for you Virgin, if you only want people who check their email twice a week to use your service, they won't need 50 mb lines, this excessive throttling of legitimate traffic will just be you shooting yourselves in the foot with the higher bandwidth packages.

The only thing keeping me at Virgin so far is the £120 charge get reconnected to BT. As soon as VM get around to trialling Phorm, it'll suddenly seem like a bargain, so I can get a BT line and head with someone like Be*.

For everyone complaining. The fastest package offered by Virgin (50Mbps) is not subject to their Traffic Management policies.

http://www.virginmedia.com/help/traffic-management.php

I've had it with VM and have cancelled my broadband, cable TV and phone. It seems the price remains the same but the service goes down. The broadband is slow (and thats being nice about it).I complained that VM now charged for their 'On Demand' which I have had for free for at least 6 months and was told by a very snotty young man that I should think myself lucky I wasn't being billed for the use I had, had because it was never a free service and that it was a 'glitch' in the system that allowed me to watch it for free. His attutude convinced me that maybe I'd be better of with another company so I cancelled. My only hope now is that the service I've moved to will be better.

Virgin Media really is a joke company. Their CEO talks about bittorrent like its the plague. You may as well wave goodbye to 75percent of your customers. Im on the apparent 10MB connection , and I can honestly say the only time I get that is between about 2am in the morning and 10am. At the moment it is capped between 10am - 3pm, 5pm - 9 pm. LOL! bye bye virgin im changing next week.