After writing the first article about the Government petition that has started to defend Broadband Consumers i though i might follow it up with a few real world usage examples about virgin media.

First off lets set the record straight Virgin Media are by no way the worst Broadband supplier in the UK, You would have to look at the DSL providers who already own that crown outright. But Virgins Throttling policy is more than a little ridiculous in the real world for many reasons.

So where do we begin in this minefield of errors made by Virgin Media. Lets start with a quick overview of what triggers Virgin to throttle you account, and what general use in theory could get you throttled..

M Package Customers:
During peak times, the top 5% on the Size: M package download at least 350MB of traffic each. Any users hitting this amount during peak times (4pm till midnight) will have their broadband speed temporarily traffic managed – their download speed will be set to 1Mb, with their upload speed set to 128Kb. This will last for 4 hours from when the traffic management policy is applied.

L Package Customers:
During peak times, the top 5% on the Size: L package download at least 750MB of traffic each. Any users hitting this amount during peak times (4pm till midnight) will have their broadband speed temporarily traffic managed – their download speed will be set to 2Mb, with their upload speed set to 192Kb. This will last for 4 hours from when the traffic management policy is applied.

XL Package Customers:
During peak times, the top 5% on the Size: XL package download at least 3GB of traffic each. Any users hitting this amount during peak times (4pm till midnight) will have their broadband speed temporarily traffic managed – their download speed will be set to 5Mb, with their upload speed set to 256Kb. This will last for 4 hours from when the traffic management policy is applied.

What Virgin Media are basically saying above is “When you are most likely to be at work or sleeping 12PM to 5PM you can use your broadband connection to it’s full potential, and receive the service you are paying for and as is advertised Virgin Media”.

We did notice they advertise Unlimited Downloads (unlike some of our competitors) which is pretty cheeky we thought. Hopefully they will change this soon to Unlimited Restricted Downloads (like some of our competitors) which is a little closer to the truth.

Virgins trigger limits are also highly unrealistic especially the M Package at 350MB, that would indicate that a Virgin customer watching DiggNation Quicktime HD (730MB) online would be throttled after only half the episode? Another example would be the same customer downloading the v2.1.0 patch For World Of Warcraft at (350MB) could again be throttled.

It’s plain for all to see with these two simple examples above Virgin has not taken into account normal Internet use in 2007. P2PViNE decided we had better do a little research on Virgin’s behalf.

Lots of Customers of Virgin will no doubt visit popular video streaming websites like youtube and stage6divx, so what kind of bandwidth is typically used when watching videos online.

Youtube Example
Video: Linkin Park - Crawling (Piano)
Runtime: 3min 31 secs
Stream size: 8.5MB

Stage6Divx Example
Video: Blondie - Heart of Glass
Runtime: 3min 29 secs
Stream size: 44.5MB

In real world terms this indicates that a Virgin Customer on the M Package could watch approx 41 youtube videos before the 350MB limit, even worse is a stage6 viewer hitting the 350MB limit by watching only 8 videos. This is not the service they pay for or should be receiving.

With UK Broadband speeds already under scrutiny Regulator Ofcom has launched an investigation into the way broadband companies advertise their services. We wouldn’t hold any breath on a result soon.

Computeractive has also launched a campaign in the UK for broadband after their recent survey showed massive failings in ADSL.

The Computeractive campaign follows a similar survey carried out by Which? last month, they found out that the average speed of 300 customers tested was just 2.7Mbps. The maximum speed obtained was just 6.7Mbps and the lowest was a measly 0.09Mbps – practically dial-up speed.

UK Broadband is already way behind the rest of the world and policies like Virgins are helping it to stay there.

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Tags | bandwidth, isp, Throttling, virgin media