Virgin Media – Traffic Management

Traffic Management for my Connection (20mbit / 768K) is as follows:

10am-3pm Download 7000MB then restricted to 75% of your connection speed (4mbit/200K) 

4pm – 9pm Download 3500MB then restricted to 75%

3pm – 8pm Upload 1400MB then restricted to 75%

The above sounds great (but still very bad) but today made less sense…

When Traffic Management goes bad

I had not downloaded anything today (Friday 14th Aug) and had not even got on the computer till 6:30PM anyhow. I grabbed Synergy KVM, had grabbed the latest Nvidia Driver and that was about it. At 20:55 I fired up the news groups reader and basically started to get the headers – this was going at full speed until 20:58 when it dropped to 4mbit – in other words I had been Capped.

India Calling

I called Tech Support and got India (which you tend to do after working hours) and the first guy could not help me at all as he had a complete computer crash – he told me to recall back and get another person. The next person I got explained that I had indeed be throttled back for the the next 5 hours (in other words till 2am) and he had no way of accessing the server to take off this restriction. I argued with him for a while, explained maybe my Modem was been cloned or something. As it was obvious I was getting nowhere fast with this guy – I gave up on the call.

The plan

I think the best idea here is to wait till Monday and call the number again and see if I can get a UK based person, I want to somehow escalate this so that it does not happen again – I fail to see the point of having India on call if they cannot change the system.