Virgin Throtling and BT retentions.

I had a call from BT persuading me not to leave... they are now playing up on the fact Virgin throttle the cable service and cripple it.

Anyway once Virgin throttle your speed she said it throttles you for the entire month.. I said it only throttles you for the day and resets back again... so who's right ?

Which VM product are you talking about, as what happens varies.

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

Time frame for holding you back is 5h or 12h

Remember it is not like BT don't traffic manage themselves either.

Virgin ADSL do, heavily if your in their top percent of users.

Virgin cable not so, though if you go for a lesser package like Medium you've got a greater chance of being traffic shaped, albeit at a higher speed than ADSL.

50mb service.

Yeah thanks for the confirmation.

assuming we talking about cable you both wrong.

if you hit STM limits you are throttled for 5 hours.

for traffic shaping it throttles p2p and nntp during peak hours.

based on user reports VM's throttling is way more leniant than BT broadband. also I dont know what your line sync speed, is but also consider this.

If I hit the STM limit downloading my 30mbit line is throttled to 25%, which = 7.5mbit, so even when throttled it will outperform my adsl.

50mbit service only has STM on uploads, and shaping for downloads. In short the BT lady is wrong.

Unless on the S product which is 12 hours

which isnt sold.

I'm on Be* Unlimited. Synced at 18058kbps down, and 1399kbps up.

There is no shaping here - Nor are there any caps.

Unlimited means Unlimited. The whole internet is out there, and Be* don't tell you when is best to surf / download.


Not in any rush for VM to get here any more after reading this. I wouldn't like to be 'recommended' when to do stuff on the web. Do they tell you when to watch TV? What about when to sleep?

I'm not VM's ideal demographic. There is absolutely no need for VM's proclivity to shape, other that greed. Fibre was supposed to handle so many more data-streams - Wow! - You only show up with a nippier sync speed... just don't try to use it lol.

Of course everything is relative. There is no downstream throttling on the 50Mbps or 100Mbps products. Even if I hit the upload limit and that was throttled it would still exceed yours. If my 50Mbps could only manage the 18Mbps your Be delivers I'd be calling it in as a fault.....

Edited by kwikbreaks (Thu 10-Feb-11 13:50:10)

And so you should.

The fibre should allow faster, cleaner speeds - it should not involve shaping of any sort.

In reply to a post by Guest_Again:

And so you should.

The fibre should allow faster, cleaner speeds - it should not involve shaping of any sort.

Of course it doesn't matter if its fibre, coax or wet string, with all ISPs the connections go back to a data centre somewhere. Oversell the ability of one data centre and you need more money. The alternative is to adjust the TCP traffic.

As I understand it VM have high infrastructure costs; but essentially once the data is at their data centre, they have the same usage problems per £1 that PlusNet and all the other cheap ISPs have.

Problems on cable tend to be localised. If you are unlucky and live in an area that is oversubscribed you can see some chronic contention. VM do fix these problems eventually but it can take a while. So far I've not seen much contention at all and the shaping doesn't bother me at all as I don't use the targeted protocols.

I can't go back to ADSL anyway as the line had a fault and 5 callouts didn't get it fixed so I got cable instead.

BT do suck big time - Cable would be good here, the extra TV channels would also be a bonus.

"If my 50Mbps could only manage the 18Mbps your Be delivers I'd be calling it in as a fault"

This forum seems to have many users with that there fault.

yeah and VM consider that as a fault.

if 40mbit vdsl runs at 18mbit then BT will say tough luck contention.
Whilst VM will acknowledge high utilisation on a port and compensate plus do upgrade work, granted tho the upgrade work can take half a year or so, its better than fobbing people off.

So both BT and VM shape, VM less agressive than BT.
VM in addition have STM but that doesnt apply for both 50mbit and 100mbit on the downstream.

Overall when you also consider line length factors affecting BT services VM are better, But of course there will be instances in certian areas BT is the better option.

VM are now even working on upstream channel bonding, when this rolls out we could see a nosedive on average jitter with VM.