Forum Discussion

mless's avatar
mless
Joining in
11 months ago

Broadband throttling deceit

On the whole my broadband is fine, not amazing, but fine. What massively cheeses me off is when there is high demand and they need to throttle usage in an area, but they pretend that there is an issue with your hub rather than admitting high demand. I assume it is a means of avoiding OFCOM fines or some such.

Finally managed to see this in action by having speedtest running and then starting the virgin media online “check my broadband” function. This showed that prior to running this I was getting about 0.5mbs and then during the fault finding this shot up to 10mbs and the dropped down to 0.5 again once fault finding finished.

I don’t understand why they don’t just say yeh high demand in your area sorry, rather than lying about it being a hub issue. Especially when a virgin hub reset is such a massive pain in the proverbial. Always takes f-ing ages to reconnect all the devices in the house and the reset itself quite often takes up to 5mins

6 Replies

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  • jpeg1's avatar
    jpeg1
    Alessandro Volta
    11 months ago

    VM don't apply throttling. They do often connect too many users to a segment which means at busy times there is contention and users get reduced speeds.

    Speed tests are not absolute. They require your full network capacity to get a valid reading.  If you run ANY other networking function at the same time, your modem/router has to share your network connection between them and the speed test result will be meaningless. 

  • nodrogd's avatar
    nodrogd
    Very Insightful Person
    11 months ago

    DOCSIS Cable Broadband by its nature is a shared resource. If neighbours a few houses away are saturating the network, everyones speeds in the segment will suffer.

  • cje85's avatar
    cje85
    Wise owl
    11 months ago

    There's no throttling, it's just possible for speeds to drop at peak times due to heavy usage in the area. It's like if everyone in your area turned their taps on full at the same time, the water pressure would drop. The water company isn't throttling the water supply, there just isn't enough capacity in the pipes to meet the heavy demand. 

  • Client62's avatar
    Client62
    Alessandro Volta
    11 months ago

    Sadly there are plenty of school boys that burn shared bandwidth running endless speed tests and ping floods these degrade the internet service for the whole street !

  • IPFreely's avatar
    IPFreely
    Fibre optic
    11 months ago
    mless wrote:

    On the whole my broadband is fine, not amazing, but fine. What massively cheeses me off is when there is high demand and they need to throttle usage in an area, but they pretend that there is an issue with your hub rather than admitting high demand. I assume it is a means of avoiding OFCOM fines or some such.

    Slow speeds in a small area due to high demand and insufficient capacity wouldn't cause issues with Ofcom. Throttling on the sly would in a big way. You're mistaken.