Virgin Throttles Its UK Cable Network

Virgin Media has quietly rolled out bandwidth throttling nationwide, after successful technical trials in the North West, which the ISP says means a group of heavy users will sacrifice high speeds for the benefit of the majority.

Speeds on the cable network will be limited between 4pm and midnight for traffic which Virgin considers "potentially abnormal". Virgin says the top five per cent heaviest downloaders among its three million customers will be affected - about 150,000 broadband users across the country.

Your
speed won't be moderated unless you're in the top 3% of users
(uploaders and downloaders). Our boffins ran a trial to see how much
our service was being affected. They discovered that, in certain areas,
just 3% of customers were uploading and/or downloading such a large
amount of content that it was affecting the service for other users in
these areas.

There is some overlap in the 3% of uploaders and the 3% of
downloaders. Our data has identified that the top 3% of uploaders and
downloaders makes up fewer than 5% of all users.

And we're not talking about just a few video clips. In some cases
the top 3% of uploaders and downloaders were using as much as 3GB, just
during peak times. That's around 750 music tracks in the space of a few
hours.