How does traffic management affect me? [ Edited ]

[Heavy1]

I've got a letter today from Virgin that was dated 5th of July (almost a week ago) saying I've been transferring "unusually large amounts of data" and that "this may have been resulted in your connection being managed under our traffic management policy".

I've read throught the policy and I did some research on forums but didn't quite find the anwers to my questions.

I formated my PC at the end of last month so 1st of July and few days later I might have indeed downloaded a lot of stuff, including programs and updates that I had before format, but since then I didn't download even 1gig... (thought I am live-streaming.. not sure if that affects this somehow?)

So my question is, if my connection is being manged under that traffic policy, how long will this last? Or is it for ever? Some people said its for 5 hours.. but is it for 5 hours this one time? Or is it on daily basis between peek times? Or is it after I go over my "limit"? (even thought in the same mail Virgin stated "we don't limin the amount that you can download" even though by decreasing the speed your doing just that). And if - what is my limit? And is there any way not to be controlled by that policy any more and have normal 20gb speed and not 5?

I know there was a lot of questions but if someone from Virgin could please explain this to me instead of telling me to "click here to find out more about this policy" as I've seen on many posts, that'd be great.

Thanks.

Edit: One more thing - as far as I know this only affects P2P AKA download / upload only? So it won't slow down internet browsing, video buffering or cause packet loss and higher ping / lagg in online games, right?

[paultechy]

for info about traffic policy you can goto http://www.virginmedia.com/traffic for all the info

[Heavy1]

@ paultechy

"I know there was a lot of questions but if someone from Virgin could please explain this to me instead of telling me to "click here to find out more about this policy" as I've seen on many posts, that'd be great."

I'm quoting myself in case you miss read my post.

I've read the policy.

Thanks.

[Jason_G · Accepted solution]

Hi Heavy1,

Traffic Management takes into account all content that you are obtaining from the internet, including live streaming. Once the amount of data crosses the theshold for traffic management, your speeds will be reduced for 5 hours, after which they will return to normal. This will only occur if you have crossed the threshold within the particular traffic management window, so if you downloaded heavily one day and became traffic managed, you wouldn't then be traffic managed the following day as well unless you again downloaded a high amount.

Even though your speeds are reduced during this time, you can still download and we will not cut the connection off entirely or charge you top up fees for downloading above a certain amount.

On the new doubled tiers, traffic managed connections are 50% of normal speeds, while these were previously 25% on the older packages. Therefore although the 20meg XL package would be managed down to 5meg, the doubled 60meg XL gets managed down to 30meg.

Peer to Peer traffic is also throttled at peak times across the network to allow other traffic to work as normal. This is done independantly from traffic management as this throttling is on a network level where as management is done by each individual connection.

Has that cleared things up at all?

[Heavy1]

Thank you very much that explained everything.