Whys my connection being throttled before "peak" times?

[- English -]

Im with Virgin Media 10 Meg broadband and looking at their policy, downloading more than 800mb between 16;00 and 23;00 will result in your connection temporilly being cut for 5hours.

Started off this morning downloading at 1500kbs, an hour later my connection is at 290kbs.

This is offpeak time, surely?

 

[GReaper]

Read the VM Traffic Management Policy.

VM has traffic shaping in action from 10AM to 9PM, it's just that morning and early afternoon have more generous limits - but it's still there.

 

[megadave]

Maybe it's different on the weekend?

Don't know how people can live with download limits tbh

 

[pikeh]

I used to live with one but he only ever did 40% of the washing up!






To me it just sounds like the weekend would be a peak time all by itsself?

 

[liloe]

This seems to be the worst ISP I've ever heard of (except AOL) … what are you paying? I hope not more than 10 bucks/month.

 

[Sparx]

i mostly download at night anyway so makes no difference to me

 

[cHodAX]

Loads of shite ISP's around these days with gimped fair usage policies, for that reason I have stayed with Aquiss for UK Broadband Access and Web Hosting.

They have some great packages, not cheap but top quality and some very generous allowances for peak downloads and off peak is 330gb which is more than enough for anyone but the most hardend warez junkie. Personally I went for the Business 90 package, thats 90gb peak and 330gb offpeak but on a business contention ratio of 20:1 which generally means much better connections for my gaming. It is £40 a month which I know isn't cheap but the contention ratio alone makes it worthwhile for me, oh and the 30 day contract is a real boon as well, I am not tied into some shitty deal that I can't walk away from at short notice.

 

[aika]

wtf download limits

 

[Fafnir]

wtf download limits

Download limits? *pats his 100mb line... Not download limits..

 

[Lethul]

wtf download limits

Wow, agree Didn't know download limits existed anymore. If we had download limits our 100mbit would be almost useless!

 

[Olgaline]

I'm lazy and havent read the rest of the posts,
but question becons, are you sure it's your connection "in this particular case"
or could it be the site/person/company 's upload thats limited ?


poeple are quick to wtf! as soon as top speed on their DL isnt achived,

just a thought, and lastly I'll second the huh ? download limit ?!?

 

[kirennia]

It's down to crappy english infrastructure. Because we ended up being early in deploying our copper wiring around the country, it's in place now and no company wants the burden of digging it up themselves to replace it with fibre optics without everyonelse paying. A fair few ISPs say it's BTs responsibility but they say they wont do it so we're stuck in this rut. With increasing download speeds and more people going onto the net, without these restrictions the internet would just be dogged slow for everyone so they decide to cap the highest end users.

I understand their reasoning behind it, it's just a shame that we seem to only really be ahead of 3rd world countries when it comes to internet connections as a result of their bickering...

 

[Zenith.UK]

I'm with the same ISP as cHodAX and I agree that it's one of the best ISPs that I've been with. So they're a bit more expensive than other ISPs but their policies are clearly laid out and their customer support is second to none.
It is also a month by month rolling contract that you can cancel with 30 days notice, so no long tie-in. I'm on Business 45, meaning that I get 45GB peak (8AM-8PM), 300GB off-peak (8PM-8AM). It is also on the Business circuit meaning that I get higher upload speed and prioritising of data traffic. There is no traffic shaping or port throttling, but there is a system that lowers *everyone's* maximum speed when capacity is almost maxed out. The down side is that top download speed comes down temporarily. The plus side is that you don't suffer packet loss (which is important to online gaming, VOIP and smoother transfers).

Link with my referral...


They're bringing out the 24Mbps products to exchanges that have been enabled in the next couple of months.


If you're outside the UK and wondering what the hell we're talking about, the ISP market has pretty much all gone down the road of traffic shaping, port throttling and limiting heavy users. This is because of the way that British Telecom still have an effective monopoly on ISP interconnects (Centrals). For example, a poor ISP like Tiscali crams as many subscribers onto limited capacity as they can get away with. To make it profitable, they have to limit what people can do with their connections at different times of the day, hence the idea of peak and offpeak times.

 

[Corran]

i actually use Tiscali and generally have no problem... ok so my 8mb line only reaches 6mb due to the distance to the exchange... but it was the same on other providers.

Only time i get screwed really is if i want to download torrents between 5pm-11pm, but even then with encryption i still downloading at about 200kb/s as long as i get it started before 5pm.... if i dont, then i can still download the torrents at an ok speed (re about 100kbs) but still is annoying.

(tiscali is handy for me due to the free phonecalls etc on the package, makes it competitive and cheap doing what i need. Especially considering i dont really play any online games where ping would be an issue, but from tests even if i did it be fine)

dont actually use the connection for anything that requires alot of speed currently, and as such cant complain with the service. Im sure at times though fast line be nice however still managed to download almost 40gb of stuff in last 20hrs of being online and not even been constantly downloading stuff, so it will do me

p.s. I mainly use connections from 13:00 onwards and never leave system on overnight. so that why i dont like peak rate download limits

 

[Jeros]

"who the fuck cares? we hold the service they get what WE say they get, they have no "right" to our service, its our company, we decide what they get"

corps are assholes

:disclaimer: that is not an actual quote and any similarity to any actual statements or current court cases is purely coincidental

 

[nath]

"who the fuck cares? we hold the service they get what WE say they get, they have no "right" to our service, its our company, we decide what they get"
l

That's an entirely reasonable attitude for a company to have though. Any discerning customer would simply say "fair enough, I'll take my business elsewhere". For the record, I've been with www.bethere.co.uk for a few months now. Very happy with their service, super fast, super cheap, no download or contention issues to speak of (as of yet). Plus, 10-15ms ping in CS and 2050k/s download speed - all for £17.50pcm. Lovely stuff.


edit: Also, for the Unlimited/Pro deals it's just a 3month notice period. The value is 1 year contract followed by a 1 month notice.

edit 2: This post is in no way sponsored by BeThere™ broadband.