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Traffic Management

There has been a lot of activity in various forums about Virgin Media’s so called Traffic Management system, I hadn’t come across it, let alone heard about it until I fell foul of it recently.

This systems runs at peak times, and basically throttles your broadband for 5 hours if you download too much, well too much according to Virgin is 750mb, that means a 10mbps connection is throttled to 2.5mbps for that 5 hours.

Let’s say on a Saturday night you fancy watching an HD film from the ones on offer on Xbox Live, they weight in at about 1.2gb, you can watch half the movie until your connection slows making the rest unwatchable.

This is comparable to driving your car at 75mph for some of the journey and then you can only do 25mph because you’ve reach your maximum amount of mile for that day, ludicrous as it sounds this is exactly what Virgin are doing.

So you’re paying £25 per month for this fast 10mbps connection but some of the time you can only surf at 2.5mbps, dose this sound fair?

Well the bottom line for me is that I’m not paying £25 per month for a 10mbps connection when it’s running at 2.5mbps at a time when I need it, might as well pay a £7 a month for an O2 connection at 3.6mbps, lucky for me my contract is up with Virgin so they’re going to loose my business.

You can read Vigin’s information on Traffice Management here http://www.virginmedia.com/help/traffic-management.php

Any comments?