P2P traffic throttled by Virgin Media

Communications and broadband giant Virgin Media has started to throttle its P2P and Newsgroup traffic during peak times according to recent reports.

It has been announced recently that the communications and broadband giant Virgin Media has started to throttle its P2P and Newsgroup traffic during peak times. The Internet service provider has dubbed itself as the fastest in the UK, offering speeds of up to 100Mbps. Officials from the company have said that it has become necessary to throttle P2P traffic so that slow speeds are not experienced in other areas such as with online multiplayer gaming.

The new traffic management plans from Virgin Media are being trialled at present, and the trials started several days ago. However, the good news is that it will only affect traffic that is upstream which means that download speeds will not be affected. Virgin already has traffic shaping systems in place and this latest throttling will apply in addition to this.

All packages are set to be affected by this latest throttling trial, including the 100Mbps services. On the Virgin website the company stated: “After the successful out of hours trial of our combined upstream and downstream file sharing traffic management policy we will be trialling this new policy between 17:00 and 00:00 for one week starting on Wednesday 2nd of March. Between these times P2P and Newsgroup upstream traffic will be managed in a similar way to our current downstream traffic management. If the trial is successful we’ll launch the new policy immediately. We’re interested if you could tell us how this affects your gaming experience over the next few days and if you see any general improvement in latency and ping at peak times.”

What do you make of the new throttling trial from Virgin? Leave your comments to let us know.

Source – Unite The Cows