National Broadband Speed Update 22/04/10 [ Edited ]

[Mark_Wilkin]

Further to our last update, as promised, here's the latest on the speed issues that some customers on our National (ADSL) service have been seeing during peak times. As you know, over the last few weeks we made some changes to the way our traffic management system worked to help ensure a small number of customers don't use more than their fair share of resources during peak time. This worked really well, but we were sorry to hear that not all affected customers had seen the improvement we'd have liked.

As a result, from earlier this month, we started to release additional capacity into the National network to address the slow speed issues for the remaining customers. We're pleased to confirm that this has helped significantly, with the vast majority of customers now reporting improved speeds and the ability to stream video. Whilst there is still some more work to do, we're happy that the service levels are returning to normal.

However, as video services and other high-bandwidth applications are growing in popularity, we'll be keeping a close eye on network performance with a view to monitor and take further measures as needed to ensure this doesn't happen again. We're sorry for the inconvenience some of you may have suffered, and appreciate your patience.

[Mark_Wilkin]

Hi the Virgin Media National (ADSL) team have asked me to post this to clarify why some of you may  not be seeing an increase in your speed when you're testing it.

Virgin Media doesn't prioritise speedtest sites in any way, and this would actually be counterproductive - we rely on speedtests to help diagnose customers' issues and to ensure they are getting the service expected, so accurate speedtests are just as important for us as they are for you. Getting an accurate speedtest can be tricky though - there are many factors that can affect a speedtest, for example using wireless, or other family members or devices using the connection at the same time. To get the best results, use a reliable site, over a wired connection and ensure your connection isn't being used for anything else whilst running the test.

To get an accurate speed test result from www.thinkbroadband.com customers must select port 80 and the detailed output results to ensure that the test is not classified as P2P and thus given a low priority within the network.  By not selecting Port 80 the speed test result will be circa 10% of the true service, this is also highlighted on the www.thinkbroadband.com website.

Due to the way speedtest sites work and potential inaccuracies on the testing side, it's a good idea to try other test sites such as www.speedtest.net or even the BBC iPlayer diagnostic test page which also test streaming rates as well as download speeds. 

Also we do publicly state what our traffic management policy is and that we do prioritise real time applications over non-real time applications like file downloads and Peer to Peer at peak times.  We are not unique in doing this and  most ISPs have a similar policy so if you are using these applications you will receive a better speed out of peak hours for example overnight when demand for real time applications is lower.

As with all  ISP’s we  protect the majority of customers with an abusive user policy which limits  the heaviest 1% of users to free up bandwidth for the majority of customers at peak times.  Our system is real time and only occurs during peak periods so to avoid this policy please schedule your heaviest usage for outside of the peak times.

Our Traffic Management and Abusive users policy can be found here - http://www.virgin.net/allyours/faqs/trafficManagementFAQ.html  

Also we have put in significant amounts of capacity into the ADSL network which has meant that we  can now carry significantly more streaming traffic passing through the network at peak times.  This has fixed the slow speed issue for the majority of customers and meant that the only restrictions in place are as per the stated Traffic Management policy.

[Mark_Wilkin]

I've been speaking with our National Broadband team and they've given me an update on this issue. Now that we've put extra capacity onto our third party network we've detected some pinch points across the network where in some exchanges users aren't seeing the benefit. We're working with our supplier to get those pinch points relieved as quickly as we can, but we don't currently have a confirmed fix date from our supplier for this. As soon as this is confirmed we'll post an update in this forum.

Thanks