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Virgin Trial Revised Traffic Management
11 Feb 2009 | 18.40 Europe/London
Virgin Media have announced a localised trial in Blackpool, Preston and Wigan of a revised traffic management policy for their cable broadband customers. As with the current system this will target the heaviest 5% peak time users and reduce their connection throughput if a daily download or upload GByte threshold is exceeded.
The revised scheme, which is subject to change, applies to the M, L and XL (2, 10 and 20 Mbits/s) services. Unlike the current arrangement it has separate policies for weekend and week days. The weekday evening arrangements are unchanged except for an increase in the maximum duration of throttling from 5 to 7 hours but with a release at 23:00. On the 10 Mbits/s L service, for example, downloading more than 1200 MByte (1.2 GByte) in a single day between 16:00 and 21:00 will trigger a 75% reduction in speed until 23:00.
The weekend daily upload allowances are doubled however the monitoring time also doubles from 5 to 10 hours (10:00 to 20:00). Throttling duration is up to 10 hours with a release at 23:00. The L service, for example, will allow upload of 1400 MBytes (1.4 GBytes) per weekend day peak time before triggering the throttling.
Weekend peak period for downstream traffic becomes 11:00 to 21:00 with a 25% increase in data allowance over the old 10:00 - 15:00 period. In total on a weekend day the downstream allowance falls by one sixth (16.7%) and the monitoring period starts one hour later with no hole in the mid-afternoon. The L service will for example allow a download of 3000 MBytes (3 GB) per day during the peak period before triggering the 75% throttle.
It is widely anticipated that the trial will lead to a revision across Virgin's network but this isn't a certainty. The 50 Mbits/s XXL service is excluded.
Heavier users will inevitably be disappointed however this type of traffic managment is in many ways inevitable in a shared / contended broadband system where costs are held down by sharing bandwith. As a handful of users can consume the available capacity most ISPs have some form of GB limit, per GB charging or traffic management in place. A structured approach to bandwidth management is better than the chaos of an overloaded network.
Full details of the VM trial, which are subject to change, at [ Virgin Media ]
The revised scheme, which is subject to change, applies to the M, L and XL (2, 10 and 20 Mbits/s) services. Unlike the current arrangement it has separate policies for weekend and week days. The weekday evening arrangements are unchanged except for an increase in the maximum duration of throttling from 5 to 7 hours but with a release at 23:00. On the 10 Mbits/s L service, for example, downloading more than 1200 MByte (1.2 GByte) in a single day between 16:00 and 21:00 will trigger a 75% reduction in speed until 23:00.
The weekend daily upload allowances are doubled however the monitoring time also doubles from 5 to 10 hours (10:00 to 20:00). Throttling duration is up to 10 hours with a release at 23:00. The L service, for example, will allow upload of 1400 MBytes (1.4 GBytes) per weekend day peak time before triggering the throttling.
Weekend peak period for downstream traffic becomes 11:00 to 21:00 with a 25% increase in data allowance over the old 10:00 - 15:00 period. In total on a weekend day the downstream allowance falls by one sixth (16.7%) and the monitoring period starts one hour later with no hole in the mid-afternoon. The L service will for example allow a download of 3000 MBytes (3 GB) per day during the peak period before triggering the 75% throttle.
It is widely anticipated that the trial will lead to a revision across Virgin's network but this isn't a certainty. The 50 Mbits/s XXL service is excluded.
Heavier users will inevitably be disappointed however this type of traffic managment is in many ways inevitable in a shared / contended broadband system where costs are held down by sharing bandwith. As a handful of users can consume the available capacity most ISPs have some form of GB limit, per GB charging or traffic management in place. A structured approach to bandwidth management is better than the chaos of an overloaded network.
Full details of the VM trial, which are subject to change, at [ Virgin Media ]