Author Topic: Virgin Media ISP To Hit 5% Of Their Paying Customers (Read 996 times)

GhostShip · « **on:** April 07, 2012, 12:14:53 am »

It seems Virgin are up to their old tricks, fresh from a recent scandal regarding changes made after a big ad rollout yet another swipe is taken at the consumer.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/04/03/virgin_media_network_throttling/

Quote

Virgin Media has introduced new throttling "trigger levels" for customers who make heavy use of its network.
It classified a so-called "bandwidth hog" as a 60Mbit/s customer, for example, who can download 5,000MB of data between 4pm and 9pm on a weekday before having their broadband connection throttled.

Virgin Media runs two different types of traffic management: the aforementioned STM and protocol shaping, which affects all tiers of subscribers during peak hours.

One punter said: "It seems that we are getting to the point that Virgin are selling us an ever faster service but putting so many restrictions in place for peak time, that in reality, a lot of us would be better off just having a constant guaranteed 10Mbps unmanaged service rather than paying out for 50Mbit/s or 100Mbit/s. I can't see how this can ever be done fairly."

We have seen this sort of false overusage claim before when its in reality always due to to poor investment in infrastructure, many ISP companies get greedy in this way and virgin will of course prioritise its own TV entertainment on demand system over general users of its infrastructure, as the aggreived chap above mentions, whats the point of having a theoretical top speed on tap if you cant actually use it due to excessive small print service restrictions that have seemed to grow and grow along with the offending ISP's profits.

Bluey_412 · « **Reply #1 on:** April 07, 2012, 07:53:03 am »

Lots of legitimate Streaming Video viewers could hit that wall, and they are supposedly 'legitimate users', as compared to nasty, evil, downloading pirates, who would rarely approach the kind of traffic levels described

White Stripes · « **Reply #2 on:** April 07, 2012, 01:22:49 pm »

...so if you d/l a dvd iso of the newest version of your linux distro of choice for either an install or update between 4 and 9 you are a 'bandwidth hog' ?