traffic-management help Virgin Media
At Virgin Media, we want all our customers to get the best service possible from their broadband. That means speedy downloads for all users - not just a few.
When someone is downloading and/or uploading a particularly large amount of information over a long period of time, it can slow down the broadband speed for other users who might just be checking their email or browsing online. So to make sure our service is fair for everybody, we sometimes moderate the speeds for the top 5% of customers who are downloading and/or uploading an unusually large amount.
This makes sure that the service doesn't get blocked up with people using more than their fair share - which means a lot fewer traffic jams.
That depends on the broadband package you're signed up to. You can check out the detail by taking a look at our 'Updated traffic management policy' table below.
It's important to remember that these traffic management policies only apply when the speeds are likely to be affected by people using more than their fair share.
In fact, the policies only affect the top 5% of users on a daily basis - those whose usage of the service would affect other users if they weren't managed.
To make sure all customers get the most from their connection, we automatically reduce the speed of the heaviest users at peak evening times - between 4pm and 9pm. In extreme cases, we'll now also reduce the speed between 10am and 3pm - something that'll have an impact on just 1% of our customers.
In short, our changes mean that fewer customers are expected to have their speeds managed on a daily basis. Take a look at the table below for more details.
We believe in making sure all our customers can use Virgin Broadband without being slowed down by high users. So our traffic management policy is there to keep things fair.
We know some companies may have traffic management in place to cut costs. We've never believed in cutting costs for the sake of it. We want to deliver the best possible value to all our customers - and that's exactly what we're doing. That's why we doubled the speed of our top broadband package to a supersonic up to 20Mb, are increasing our broadband L from up to 4Mb to up to 10Mb, and will be launching up to 50Mb broadband in the future.
The way that our customers use their broadband is changing all the time, so it's possible that in the future we may increase or decrease the thresholds or modify other settings. Don't worry though, we'll always let you know on our website if we're going to make any changes, and we don't expect the thresholds to change very often.
We're making some changes to our traffic management policy. We think the overall impact will be that fewer people will be affected by the traffic management policy - but it'll still make sure that use is fair for all our customers. Here's the detail:
An example of how this works is that if a broadband size M customer downloaded 500MB of data between 4pm and 9pm, their speed would be temporarily managed with their download speed set to 1Mb and their upload speed to 128Kb for a 5 hours.
To make sure you always get the fastest speeds you can from your connection, we’ve put heaps of information on our website to help. That includes details about our minimum specification, and some simple steps to tweak how your computer works. It’s all really simple, and it’s all online at virginmedia.com/minspec.
There are several tools that you can use to check how much you're downloading or uploading. One particularly useful tool you can download is called DU Meter**.
Or there are alternatives at www.tucows.com**.
** Please note, these links are provided simply as a convenience to our customers. They are third party sites, and we have no responsibility for the content of them.
