Throttling Drawbacks (VM)

Mathius

New member
As some may know I'm due to get VM's 60mb BB.

Looking at their traffic management table if I download more than 4.5gb in a 2hour window they will reduce my speed by 16%, resulting in a 50.4 line.....

Here is the great bit......even if I'm throttled at 50.4 its still more than 10x faster than what I have now ..

Question is, is there any long term drawbacks to being throttled?
lets say I always end up in the throttling area.....

From what I gather, there are no long term effects, maybe a letter from VM saying I'm a high user.....
 
i have been usinf virgin media broadband for almost two years now and i can honestly say i have never noticed any throttling :).

This is with 4 pc gamers in the house which frequently download large files and constantly stream.

Yesterday i did a clean install on my main rig and have easily downloaded over 150GB of games and benchmarks again so i may benchmark my 1440p monitor which comes next week. I have noticed no slowdown despite this.

All in all virgin media is awesome.
 
I tended to notice throttling a LOT with Virgin Media. They have gotten a lot better but they used to throttle our connection to hell all the time (95% throttling). Granted this was with a fairly low speed connection at 10Mb/s but even when we upgraded to 20Mb/s they throttled us down to 1Mb/s quite a lot. However as I mentioned they are a lot better about it now, from around september time they started only throttling us down to about 15Mb/s. I think a lot of it is about where you live and how well VM have monopolised your area, here we can only get up to 12Mb/s from any other ISP so they pretty much have us locked down.
 
I'm with Virgin media and its constantly throttling my steam downloads to 2Mb/s. If I download a similar sized file from the internet its fine but as soon as I use any software like steam it gags it. Speed test usually says I get 15-20 Mb/s. My friends who live elsewhere in Cambridge can download steam games fine and aren't throttled at all. I'm presuming in high population areas with aging sub Jurassic infrastructure (aka my area) virgin are the worst. I know of people in my neighborhood who are happy to pay the extortionate line rental and seem to be better off.
 
I used to be on a 50Mb line, after which they upgraded for free to 100Mb and again to 120Mb and I can honestly say that I've never noticed it. I've had my share of issues with VM when the area was over subscribed but that was fixed quite a while ago.
 
I have to be careful with what I say due to working for VM but anything I say is not on behalf of VM and is my opinion.

You shouldn't really notice any issues if your speed is reduced, games will still work and so will streaming and downloading/uploading, it's just that the speed of the downloads and uploads will be reduced, and the reduction in speed is far less aggressive than it use to be.

There are areas where the speed reductions don't appear to be happening anymore and I am not sure if that is accurate or not, because I have not seen anything officially released as a internal comms to say that they have turned it off but, I have not had my speed reduced for over 3 months now.

There are still areas that suffer with poor speeds etc, and dependent on how each customer has been installed in to the street cabs can make a difference as well as I have, seen some really shockingly poor cabinets where install crews have used 4 way splitters to connect disconnect and reconnect people, instead of doing what they are supposed to do and that has caused issues for people on that cabinet.

The experience you have though will be your own experience, and it doesn't matter what anyone says it will just be down to how the network is in that area.

I will say though that, Liberty Global who now own VM are insisting on the network getting sorted ASAP for everyone, and they are giving the money to do that which is a hell of allot of money, when you take in to account one piece of hardware which is a connector cost's around £10k each and they need, at least 10-30 of them per hubsite around the country.

Hope you have a good experience with them though.
 
well I'm hoping that my experiences are great.....around 3/4 of my neighbourhood are connected to VM and from me asking around all responses seem positive....

I'm not really bothered about my upload speed as I don't tend to upload any videos etc...
Download speed and ping are more important to me....and both of which will be a million miles better than my current 3 network speeds.

Edit,
infact I will be uploading a few vids, troubleshooting a weird thing with my graphics card, but that's for it's own thread.
 
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Pings in general are really good I have noticed, usually in Battlefield 4 my ping is around 16ms to my clans server in London and I am North West England, pings to German/French servers are normally in the low 30's.

Depends on the game and the server hoster though, as some times my pings by upwards of 40ms to servers in the UK.

However I have played on a few American servers and had pings of 90ms, so not to bad.

Uploads speeds are the thing that I always moan about to people at work though, but that's the downside to the Docsis platform they are using currently.
 
Pings in general are really good I have noticed, usually in Battlefield 4 my ping is around 16ms to my clans server in London and I am North West England, pings to German/French servers are normally in the low 30's.

Depends on the game and the server hoster though, as some times my pings by upwards of 40ms to servers in the UK.

However I have played on a few American servers and had pings of 90ms, so not to bad.

Uploads speeds are the thing that I always moan about to people at work though, but that's the downside to the Docsis platform they are using currently.

While I have as good as a customer service rep on the thread :lol: how does VM's partnered AV software stack up (F-Secure)? My Avast is into its last few weeks, and at £25 for the year or 2.50 a month, I might give this a whirl.

.....obviously 'personal' opinion.....
 
Apologies for the double post but didn't feel the need to create a new thread for this .....I did search for a VM thread but seen that the last post was in 2011, no-one likes waking the dead.

Anyway, the Guy just come about an hour ago (even though there is a note on the system that I'd be out on a school run so to come after 9)

He did however drop a line that has got me thinking.....
He asked if the PCs were wireless, to which I said no, they will be wired.
Then went on to say that he can only connect 1 PC through a cable.....

Now I've seen the router instore and it has 4 ports...
Is this Guy being real and I do in fact need a wifi card for the 2nd PC, or is it VM being restrictive with cable.
 
Basically in the simplest setup it's one PC per one LAN port on the router per one cable, so if you buy 4 cables you can connect 4 PC's because you have 4 lan ports on your router(some have more).
 
that's what I thought ...

This guy mentioned that he can only set it up for one machine, but I'm thinking now its because its VM's setup policy to only provide one cable...
 
VM being cheap? well I never... ;)

I know they disabled one port on my router so you might have same issue. To be honest you should just get a new wireless as well as the superhub is awful at everything ever.
 
Right the guy has just installed everything but for some odd reason my desktop wont recognise it....

SuperHub is online as my phone is connected wirelessly to it, but desktop wont read it...
I'm in the process of uninstalling my 3Connect Dongle Software and updating the motherboard LAN driver,

will post back with results
 
Apologies for the double post but didn't feel the need to create a new thread for this .....I did search for a VM thread but seen that the last post was in 2011, no-one likes waking the dead.

Anyway, the Guy just come about an hour ago (even though there is a note on the system that I'd be out on a school run so to come after 9)

He did however drop a line that has got me thinking.....
He asked if the PCs were wireless, to which I said no, they will be wired.
Then went on to say that he can only connect 1 PC through a cable.....

Now I've seen the router instore and it has 4 ports...
Is this Guy being real and I do in fact need a wifi card for the 2nd PC, or is it VM being restrictive with cable.

Which Exchange are you using? There are 3 in the Newport area and only one has a full list of services the other two do not support full VM
 
I think the exchange is only in phone lines,

its Fibre Optic 60mb, I've done the uninstall of 3, and update of LAN driver, still nothing
 
can we go back to basics....

I'm connected and posting this via my phone connected to the superhubs wifi. I can access my superhub main page 192.168 on the desktop but that's it..

annoyingly on the network icon near the clock I get.

Currently connected to.
Network - no internet access
Unidentified network - no internet access

Dial up and VPN.
3Connect

however that 3connect shouldn't be there as its uninstalled.

its strange how the desktop doesn't just detect the router.
 
can we go back to basics....

I'm connected and posting this via my phone connected to the superhubs wifi. I can access my superhub main page 192.168 on the desktop but that's it..

annoyingly on the network icon near the clock I get.

Currently connected to.
Network - no internet access
Unidentified network - no internet access

Dial up and VPN.
3Connect

however that 3connect shouldn't be there as its uninstalled.

its strange how the desktop doesn't just detect the router.

I take it you removed the 3 dongle when you uninstalled it?
 
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