Virgin Media traffic management *rant*

Excuse the rant, but I feel the need to vent my frustration with Virgin Media.

I live in a houseshare with 2 other people in the Bromley area, and we've had NTL:cable (first 2mbit, later 4) for about 2 and a half years. It's been fantastic - fast, reliable, unrestricted. That is, until Virgin took over.

Virgin didn't have the courtesy to notify us of the traffic management system they'd put in place, and as a result I'd had no idea as to why the net's performance now degrades so badly in the evening. With 3 of us sharing and only a 128k upload when restricted, the performance is unbearable, as my housemates leave their P2P applications running during this time. Yes, we do transfer a lot, but that's what we've been paying �25 a month for. Now, we are able to use up our 800mb allowance within 30 minutes of the 5 hour management window. My problem is that I have to wait minutes to even get websites up; at least, they could limit their restrictions to the P2P ports (a la PlusNet) so I can at least browse.

What really annoys me though, is the fact that Virgin have taken away something that we had before, so we've had no choice in the matter. We're still paying the same each month.

IMHO this trend of selling faster and faster connections (e.g. VM's proposed 50mbit cable service) yet slyly limiting them in some way is misleading and, moreover, pointless. I'd rather have a 2mbit connection that I knew had no limits imposed than something faster with some sort of management. The people who'll actually need that kind of speed are the people who want to download a lot and yet they can't - It's like having a Ferrari and being stuck in traffic when you want to drive it.

They haven't really taken anything away as it's throttling not capping.

I see your point though and I wouldn't like to be in the same situation.

Get the P2P people to stop their apps - you may find that if they are swamping what capacity is left to you, that your HTTP is getting poorly handled.

Many P2P apps allow you to slow them down or put time windows in place. Surely they do some web browsing too - so having slow pages is a pain to them too?