Virgin Media Traffic Management as of April 16th 2013

As covered in our news Virgin Media has introduced a new version of traffic management. With a shorter penalty period if people reduce their usage level.

Pending Virgin Media website updating you can see details on how this affects people on a 30 Mbps or faster service below: Information from Virgin Media follows:

Minimum period of traffic management
60 minutes* When traffic management happens
We monitor customer uploads and downloads during the following times:

� Monday to Friday: 16:00-23:00
� Saturday and Sunday: 11:00-23:00

* If you reduce your usage below the threshold as soon as you enter traffic management, you can exit traffic management in 60 minutes. If you don�t, you may be in traffic management for 120 minutes or more and have further reductions in your speed. See customer scenarios for more.

How do I get out of Traffic Management?
First of all, don�t worry. It�s just temporary and you can carry on using your broadband during traffic management anyway. It doesn�t stop anything you�re doing, you may just notice the speed has slowed. To get back to full speed all you need to do is reduce your usage during peak hours.

This is important if you use peer-to-peer (P2P) networks a lot. P2P is software such as BitTorrent which allows you to download files that are stored on the hard drives of other users.

Here are three examples of how a customer might be traffic managed:

Customer One downloads more than the threshold for their tier of service and is traffic managed for the following 60 minutes. They notice that their speed has dropped due to traffic management and reduce what they�re doing straight away. At the end of this 60 minutes they exit traffic management and their broadband speed returns to normal.

Customer Two downloads more than the threshold for their tier of service and is traffic managed for the next 60 minutes. They carry on using their connection so heavily that their total usage triggers the 120 minute policy and a further cut in speed. They then reduce what they are doing and 120 minutes after the second policy threshold was triggered they exit traffic management and their broadband speed returns to normal.

Customer Three downloads more than the threshold for their tier of service and is traffic managed for the next 60 minutes. They carry on using their connection so heavily that they trigger the 120 minute policy and a further cut in speed. If this customer doesn�t reduce what they�re doing they will carry on triggering repetitions of the 120 minute policy until their last traffic management session ends, which may be during the off-peak period. Only then will they exit traffic management and their broadband speed return to normal.

A link to the old traffic management policy

Edited by MrSaffron (Tue 16-Apr-13 13:53:37)