News Virgin Media warns of digital distribution pitfalls

I'm not sure where all this gumpf is coming from anymore.
I've been with Virgin for nearly 2 years now and i've never noticed throttling of any sort. Fair enough I live just outside Glasgow where uptake has been pretty slow compared to London, but still. I'm on a 60mbps package and that's exactly what I get, day or night.
http://www.speedtest.net/my-result/3139597624
http://www.speedtest.net/my-result/2883915934
http://www.speedtest.net/my-result/2628104838

 

1 - The odd blip every now and again... but mainly fine...

2 - 7 Megabyte/sec d/l from the 'UK-Manchester' content server... Do get throttled after a while but can't remember how much by... Not used origin in a fairly long time so can't comment...
EDIT: Downloads from the XBox Marketplace seem to take forever but I think that's at MS' end...

3 - Server dependent but I can't say I've had any lag issues...

That's on the 60 Meg package...

 

Surely people responded based on experience of their own connections 14.7mb/s may be the average but it's 41mb/s here.

Which is rural out of the town location.

 

Every time HS2's £50 billion (or so) estimated cost comes up on the news, I can't help but think they could put fibre optic into everyone's home instead.

 

Not sure if they changed their policies since I left them, but Virgin Media did punish people who used p2p, unfortunately they never differentiated between legitimate uses of p2p and illegal uses, so lets say you played a perfectly legal game you had purchased legally and that game used p2p (like for example Trackmania) you suddenly found your ping in the 4 digit area and downloads in the 0.01mb range.

 

Never had anything like that happen... and I use P2P a *lot*...

 

Then you're probably not hitting their "fair usage" throttle limit.
We have the 60mbps service as well and we have to be very careful especially at weekends not to go into throttle time, all it takes is one large game from steam coming down full speed and thats it throttled for an hour or two.

 

I'm on exactly that 60Mbit package. Steam is currently downloading at 1.4MB/sec, which is rubbish. I'm connected to the router by gigabit, and get the full 60mbit on speedtest.net.

 

Probably an issue with Steam, tbh - it's sales season, so their servers will be overloaded. Outwith the sales, I get full speed downloads from Steam (about 3.6MB/sec on my 30MBit connection with VM).

 

These are the things that I'm concerned about. I wonder what their 'fair usage policy' is - its hard to find out the exact terms.

Yes, in fairness, at the moment the Steam content servers will be getting hammered. Didn't I read about Virgin becoming an official Steam content server partner or something?

 

VM's traffic management has been changed recently and it's a lot more lenient than it used to be. On 30Mb the slowest your connection will get throttled to is now something like 24Mb and the time scale for this is now adaptive and ranges within a 1hr period (low level throttle) and 2hr period (high level throttle down to 24Mb).

Previously if you downloaded more than a few gigs during the day they would cut as much as 50% of the overall downstream speed and you'd be stuck like that for 5hrs.

 

They've updated it since I last checked but here are the thresholds and throttles for the various VM packages...

From what i can tell they've lowered the thresholds for throttling, but lowered how much they throttle you by [and for how long]... Can't say I've noticed anything major throttle wise, and I have uTorrent running constantly...

 

Virgin Media officially stating their network isn't up to scratch? Is it April fools?

Still the best ISP around here sadly. If someone were to offer fibre i'd jump ship immediately.

 

Why would any game be a 50GB download when there is such a thing as compression.

Take out the extra languages from your typical 20GB game and you're left with 5-10GB of real files and 1 language.

 

Well I have no issues with my connection and because I work for Virgin Media Business I get to see allot of stuff that I cannot talk about, but yesterday I left just over 400Gb of stuff downloading and when I got home I found that I had not been reduced in speed at all.

The only time I have had my speed reduced lately is when I uploaded a few videos to youtube and my upload speed was reduced.

For anyone who think's it's just a case of using some of the "profits" to pay for a network upgrade, it's not that simple especially when you take in to account the cost to buy the equipment for doing the upgrade.

The upgrade that has just taken place where I live, cost just over around the £250,000 mark for the equipment, then there was the new cables that were needed and civils work which took it up to just over around the £300,000 mark.

Either way it's not cheap but with the next lot of investment in the network, and from what I have seen then speed will not be a issue for most people.

 

Those upload speeds are brutal! I am moving next month and have to leave Sky and go with Virgin to get decent internet but I can't believe how slow the upload is on the 60MB line. Hardly flying on the 100MB line either.

...Crap!

 

Been with virgin since they brought out cable in my area and never had problems. I have everything with virgin including my mobile network. I'll stick with them and yes the upload it's slow for the 120mb connection but it suits me fine for now

 

I personally had a pretty bad year last year with virgin, ok download speeds most of the time, but horrific ping, either spikes or constant 500ms+

Mainly due to the superhub being bad I think, but even after we put it in modem mode and used a decent ASUS router it didn't solve all of the issues.
Will be looking for alternatives when I head back to uni next year.

(I'm not saying people shouldn't go with Virgin, merely that like all companies there's the chance you'll have a bad experience, they aren't perfect)

 

Yea it would be nice if VM had higher upload speeds, not sure how they compare with the upload speeds of other ISP's. If it helps these are the corresponding upload to download speeds.
30Mbit has a 2Mbit upload
60Mbit has a 3Mbit upload
120Mbit has a 12Mbit upload

That sound exactly like what i was getting last year, have you tried recording the quality of the line using something like thinkbroadbands line monitoring system and posting the results on the VM forums.