UK Broadband supplier Virgin Media are set to increase the upload speed of all its tiers starting now and rolling out area by area. There is no extra cost for this service and on there fastest service (XXL) they are going form 1.5Mbps to 5Mbps, the lower speed tariff 20Mbps (XL) will have their upload changed from 768K to 2Mbps. With the good also comes the bad – not only are they restricting your traffic as before but also slowing down Newsgroup and Torrent Traffic.
I currently have various services from Virgin and one of them includes Broadband which is provided by cable. They offer a choice of 10Mbit / 512kbit, 20Mbit / 768kbit and finally 50Mbit / 1.5Mbit. On both the 10Mbit and 20Mbit connections, they have bandwidth throttling which comes into place between 9am and 9pm. I liked the idea of upgrading to 50mbit but personally I could not see the need for such a thing.
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…
I wanted to grab a Linux Distro (Sabayon) and used FTP to get this, the latest was on DVD only (3.87 Gigs) and I started this I thought well within the time period for been throttled. Later I came back and it was still downloading – the speed was the trade mark 2mbits and upon speed testing – was confirmed I was been throttled.I went off and checked the numbers – after all how was I expected to use my connection now?
