Virgin cable bandwidth policies

Just curious to know what Virgin's policy is for periodic heavy use?

I know they operate shaping, but what triggers that?

For example, a couple of months ago I tested (I'm a journalist) a cloud-based online storage/backup service. 200GB was uploaded over a period of 3 weeks split between my home (Virgin XL) and my office (at the time it was Eclipse ADSL) though I consciously limited the uploads at the office because our ADSL there was very slow and we had a bandwidth limit to keep an eye on (which I believe included both uploads and downloads). I do think my Virgin speed suffered as a result for a period, but I also know that at peak times the speed here can crawl.

Earlier today I downloaded 7 iPlayer programmes - amounting to over 4GB on top of other traffic. Is that a bit risky?

Wish there was some firm guidance I could refer to.

ian

try here

http://shop.virginmedia.com/help/traffic-management/...

XL has a download 10GB limit between 10AM-3PM, these are no restrictions on upload during this time. Between 4PM and 9PM there is a 5GB download limit, and a 1.75GB upload limit between 3PM and 8PM.

All other hours are limitless for the XL package, should you breach one of the limits then the effects will be felt immediately for a duration of 5hrs, speed gets limited to 25% of your maximum speed, so for 30Mb it would be 7.5Mb downstream and 256kbps upstream.