1) 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 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 the Internet 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 monitor network performance and if someone is downloading a large amount of data and impacting others we may moderate their speed during the peak times (4pm till midnight weekdays and 10am to midnight on the weekend). This ensures that the service doesn't get blocked up with people using more than their fair share on our unlimited service.
2) What is traffic management and what is the Beyond Cable 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 the peak times of the day. We measure this on a Kilobytes (KB) downloaded per hour basis. This allows us to identify the small number of customers who are trying to download excessive amounts of data over a small period of time and the even smaller number of people who are downloading vast amounts of data constantly during peak times. Both types of behaviour can be at the detriment of service to the vast majority of the Virgin Media customers. We reserve the right to traffic manage these customers during peak times using one of the following policies depending on the behaviour of the customers in question.
To ensure that all customers receive the appropriate level of service at peak times we will limit customers who have downloaded an excessive amount of data during a one hour period of the peak time frame. These customers will be limited on a one off basis to 512Kbit/s for the remainder of the peak period for that day. The peak period 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 2% of our customers), our traffic management solution will temporarily set download speeds to no lower than 80Kbit/s. This limit is applied daily, 4pm until midnight, for one week. In the same week during off-peak periods our traffic management solution will automatically reset download speeds back to their full speed and no traffic management will be applied.
Each week we review our heaviest peak-time users over the previous 7 days. We then update the refreshed customer list to our servers for traffic shaping. This should mean a customer does not have their traffic managed for two consecutive weeks.
Even for the small number of customers whose service is traffic-managed there is a limited impact. At 80Kbit/s a customer has full use of their browsing and email capability, and can still download around 8 music tracks in an hour.
3) What is the 'Application Management' and how it works?
During peak periods, we also reserve the right to manage the amount of bandwidth allocated to certain applications (such as Peer-to-Peer file sharing) and we refer to this process as 'Application Management'. Controlling the amount of bandwidth allocated to certain applications helps us provide the best possible experience for the majority of our customers. We only apply this to applications whose operation is not time-critical as part of our acceptable usage policy.
For example, Peer-to-Peer file sharing is an application that tends to use a huge amount of bandwidth while trickling file downloads/uploads in the background. This means it can continue to operate with a (temporarily) reduced bandwidth allocation.
4) How can I tell if I'm being traffic-managed?
The vast majority of users (circa 95%) should not notice a change in their broadband service. If you think that you are being 'traffic-managed' you can check your speed using a trust worthy speed checker on the Internet. There are several tools that you can use to check how much you're downloading. One particularly useful tool you can download is called DU Meter. You can download it at http://www.hageltech.com/dumeter/.
If you'd like to use a different tool, you might like to try www.tucows.com.
5) Will the traffic management policy change?
We may from time to time need to review traffic management and how we apply this across our network so that the majority of our customers receive the best possible value for their broadband service. Any changes to traffic management policy will be reflected in this document and will be published 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 posted on the Site.
This traffic management document forms part of our Acceptable Use Policy within our Terms and Conditions.