Following successful trials in the North West region of England, Virgin Media has announced that it has been rolling out bandwidth throttling across the UK. According to Virgin officials this means that a small percentage of its customers will have to face reduced Internet speeds for the benefit of the vast majority of broadband customers. The heaviest download customers will be affected by the process according to Virgin, and these reduced speeds will affect around one hundred and fifty thousand of its heaviest users, which equates to around the top five percent.

Virgin states that this process is far fairer than the process used by many other Internet Service Providers, where an unpublished monthly cap on uploads and downloads is enforced. By using broadband throttling the ISP states that only a small percentage of customers will be affected, and that their speeds will simply be reduced once they reach specified upload and download levels rather than being capped. Therefore customers that are with Virgin Media will not have to put up with restrictions on their downloading and uploading, but some may have to cope with reduced speeds after a certain amount of downloading and uploading.

The throttling will take place between four o’ clock in the afternoon and midnight, so users will be affected for an eight hour period each day. After 350MB of downloads during this period, those on the ‘M’ package with Virgin will have speeds reduced from 2MB to 1MB for downloads and 128 KB for uploads. For those on the ‘L’ package 750MB will be allowed during the period before speeds are reduced from 4MB to 2MB for downloads and 192 KB for uploads. And those on the highest speed package ‘XL’ will be reduced from 10MB to 5MB for downloads and 256 KB for uploads.

Yvan Bamping of broadband comparison site http://www.broadband-expert.co.uk believes “it could present issues for customers who use their broadband connections for activities such as VoIP (broadband phone calls), online gaming or heavy downloader’s of music and film”.

Not all customers are happy with Virgin Media’s proposals, with one customer subscribing to the ‘M’ package stating: “I am on their 4Mb/s tier and it looks like I will be throttled as soon as I have downloaded 750MB, which in today’s internet is next to nothing - not even one DVD. I use Skype with 2-way video most evenings to chat to my girlfriend when she is abroad…I certainly wouldn’t say I am abusing the network - but Virgin Media would.”

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