Traffic Management FAQs
- What is our Acceptable Usage Policy?
- What is traffic management and what's Virgin Media National's traffic management policy?
- What is the 'Application Management' and how it works?
- How can I tell if I'm being traffic-managed?
- Will the traffic management policy change?
Acceptable Usage and Traffic Management Policies For Our Virgin Media National Broadband Customers
What is our Acceptable Usage Policy?
Here at Virgin Media, we want all our customers to get the best service possible from their broadband. That means speedy downloads for all our users - not just a few.
When someone is downloading a particularly large amount of information over a long period of time, it can slow down internet speed for other users who might just be checking their email or browsing online. So, to make sure our service is fair for everyone, we monitor the network's performance and, if someone is downloading a large amount of data and impacting others, we may moderate their speed during peak times (4pm to midnight on weekdays and 10am to midnight on the weekend). This makes sure that the network doesn't get blocked up with people using more than their fair share on our unlimited service.
Back to topWhat is traffic management and what's Virgin Media National's traffic management policy?
We reserve the right to implement a traffic management policy to help ensure a small number of heavy users do not affect the service for everybody else. A small minority of customers actually download enough information to significantly affect the service for other customers' broadband service. To put it another way, just 5% of customers could account for around 70% of data downloaded at peak times. This obviously would impact everybody's service so we reserve the right to traffic manage specific customers download speeds during peak periods to improve the service for everyone else.
Each day we monitor how much data our customers download during peak times and we measure this by how many kilobytes (KB) are downloaded per hour. This lets us identify the small number of customers who are downloading excessive amounts of data over a short period of time and the even smaller number of people who are downloading vast amounts of data constantly during peak times. Both of these can slow down broadband speeds for other Virgin Media customers, so we reserve the right to traffic manage these customers during peak times. The way we limit those customers depends on their downloading behaviour.
To make sure all our customers are getting the right level of service at peak times, we limit customers who have downloaded an excessive amount of data for one hour during peak time. These customers will be limited, on a one-off basis, to a 512Kbit/s limit for the rest of the peak period for that day and we'll do this after they've downloaded over 300Mb during a single one-hour period. Peak time is from 4pm to midnight during the week and 10am till midnight at the weekend.
For the small number of customers who constantly download excessive amounts of data (around 0.5% of our customers), our traffic management solution will temporarily set download speeds to no lower than 80Kbit/s. This limit is applied every day, between 4pm and midnight, for one week and outside peak time, the customer will have their full download speed back. We only apply this limit to customers who have downloaded more than 5Gb during the peak times of the week, and we don't include downloads outside of the peak time in our total.
Each week we review our heaviest peak-time users over the last week and update the refreshed customer list to our servers for traffic shaping. All this means is that customers won't have their traffic managed for two consecutive weeks.
Even for the small number of customers whose service is traffic-managed, there isn't much of an impact. At 80Kbit/s, a customer can still use the internet and can download around 8 music tracks in an hour.
Back to topWhat is the 'Application Management' and how it works?
During peak periods, we also reserve the right to manage the amount of bandwidth dedicated to certain applications (such as Peer-to-Peer file sharing) and this is what we call 'Application Management'. Controlling the amount of bandwidth used by certain applications helps us provide the best possible experience for the majority of our customers.
As part of our Acceptable Usage Policy, we make sure that we only apply this to certain applications, so that we don't interrupt anything you might be doing. For example, Peer-to-Peer file sharing uses applications that tend to take up a huge amount of bandwidth downloading and uploading in the background. This means it can carry on operating with a (temporarily) reduced bandwidth allocation.
Back to topHow can I tell if I'm being traffic-managed?
The vast majority of users (circa 95%) shouldn't notice a change in their broadband service, but if you think you're being 'traffic-managed' you can check your speed using a speed checker on the Internet. There are plenty to choose from, but one particularly useful tool you can download is called DU Meter. You can download it at www.hageltech.com/dumeter. Or, if you'd like to try a different one, check out www.tucows.com. If you've exceeded the 5Gb limit during peak times, you'll be e-mailed to let you know about 80Kbit/s peak time limit for the following week.
Will the traffic management policy change?
From time to time, we might need to review traffic management and how we apply it across our network so that the majority of our customers receive the best possible broadband service. We'll keep these FAQs updated and publish any changes on our website. We reserve the right to modify this traffic management document at any time without prior notice and solely at our own discretion. Any changes will take effect when they've been posted on the site.
This traffic management document forms part of our Acceptable Use Policy within our Terms and Conditions.