Having spent an hour on the phone with these amateur arseholes this morning I can now fill you in on their UNWRITTEN fair usage policy.

If youre on a 4mb line, between the hours of 4pm & midnight you are only allowed to download 750mb & if you go over this your speed will be cut in half for the rest of the night.

If youre on a 10mb line, this increases to 3gb.

I asked him why they dont state this in their fair usage policy & I was told thats its only been implemented for 2 months & its written into everybodys new contracts & theres no plans to write it into the online FUP for older customers like me.

Well I kicked off & they begged me to stay & offered to upgrade me from 4-10 at no extra cost to me for 12 months with the guarantee that it will be 20mb by September. I've heard all this crap before with the last upgrade that took 18 months longer than the specified times. But for now, with having recently bought a DSL router I'll try it & the first time they bugger my speed up thats gonna be game over & bye bye Branson & your outfit of professional blaggards.

It's actually (slightly) worse than that.

If you're on 10mb or 20mb, when you download 3gb after 4pm your download AND upload is halved (quartered if you're on 20mb) for 4 hours, at which point it is restored to it's full speed.

if (when) when you hit 3gb again, your speed is again halved/quartered, the real pisser is that if you hit 3gb @ 11:59 i.e 1 minute before monitoring ends you are throttled for the full 4 hours!

Therefore you are effectively throttled for half of every day!

wierd isp's you got there

Corrected

In semi-related news Orange were recently wrist slapped by the ASA for advertising their service as Unlimited when it subject to a FUP.

However, don't get too excited. They were rapped for not including a footnote in their ads, mentioning the FUP. The ASA still hasn't come to grips with the fact that a FUP and "Unlimited" service are mutually exclusive.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/06/13 ... dband_asa/

I noticed some throttling about a month ago, my downloads would go from
>200KB to about 70KB. Can't say i've noticed anything in the last week or so tho

There's an ever growing call for the entire ISP industry in the UK to be examined due to the way it mis-sells it's product, can't come soon enough in my opinion.

All the current farce shows is how ineffective OFCOM are.

Well, after having waited for two months to get connected, having fun for 9 days and then have an on and off connection (very unstable) for 5 days, I can only cross my fingers for my line to stay as it is now. I never experienced any throttling, but then again, when did I ever get that chance?

The problem with ISP's in the Netherlands is that if you call for help or with a complaint (the latter being more common than the first in my case), you get a helpdesk with people that barely, if ever, know more about computers and internet than me. I never get to talk to a person who is actually working in the same building as where the CEO's of my ISP are seated. This way, my complaints will always smother in the swamp of callcenters, which is exactly the way my dear CEO's like to see it.

OK, one example: when my connection got lost (after the 9 days working mentioned above), I called.
Callcenter employee: "No problem, I'll transfer your complaint to the Technical Department".
Me: "Will they call me hen they have any questions?"
CE: "Yes, they'll call you, on the following ellphone number ......."
Me: "OK, I hope it will be fixed soon."
CE: "Of course, sir, of course."

A few hours later, nothing changed and I didn't get a call back, so I called again.
CE: "Didn't my colleague tell you how long it takes before the Technical Department starts to work on your complaint?"
Me: "No, he didn't"
CE: "Well, it takes five days."

I exploded.

Five days later, my connection was working properly again, I get a call.
"Hello, the Technical Deparmtent here. We have this complaint coming from you that your connection is lost."
Me: "Yes, that's right."
Technical Dpt Guy: "But I see here on my screen that your modem is working properly, so what's the problem?"

Because internet was working properly at that time, I didn't explode again, but it took me a lot not to. Man, I usually am very well suited against stress, but these ISPs...

Virgin, and Telewest before them, are like most ISP's. They employ complete monkeys for tech support and it takes forver to actually speak to someone who has half a clue what they are talking about.

TBH I gave up phoning VM due to this very fact, they just keep telling you to unplug the modem etc.... Fucking idiots. Now I go through the tech support newsgroups, much faster and the staff there are semi-intelligent.

I have been following the Virgin throttling for a long time now on the newsgroups, way back when it was a concelt, then those months of testing, and now the reality.

Alot of us suggested a higher limit on a 24HR rolling day. Way too many people are gonna get hit for no reason just because that is the only time they can use it. Yes I do appreciate this is also the time of heaviest ue in general but tough titty. They sold me an unmetered and unlimited connection, not what I have now.

I have started scheduling stuff to abuse the net during the day instead now, leaves my evenings free for a bit of online and wlan gaming.

The main thing that pissed people off is a matter of perspective, VM claim the connection is not capped, and I appreciate in the clissical meaning of the word it is not, but at the end of the day they are reducing how much I can download, therefore I am not getting what I pay for.

The biggest problem for the saps that got caught in the trials was the fact they could not be told what the triggers were LOL

Mind you, it could need some more work. VM insist it ignores 'junk' and only includes what I tell it to download, this is incorrect. A lot of us have begun monitoring our connections with good reason. I have 20 meg and therefore should be 'traffic shaped' after 3 gig of downloads, 2 nights running I have been capped at well under half that, very fucking annoying indeed.

Just checked and once again I have been capped again after just an hour and a half. Wanna know how much data I have shifted since 4PM?

128Meg uploaded and just a fucking shitty 943Meg downloaded. Total since midnight are currently running at 589Meg uploaded and 1.74Gig downloaded.

Accrding to my stupid consumer brain I have not reached the target since 4 PM, hell, I aint even reached the target if you add up and down for the previous 17 hours.

Initially I was not too phased about the throttling, like I said above I just adapted and started using my connection heavily during the day. The problem started when the stoopid bean counters at VM broke the abacus and forgot how to count.

Sorry, rant over.

Ahhhh, well he didnt say it was for 4 hour bursts, just that it would remain until the program kicks in at midnight & unthrottles me. But what youve said sounds more realistic coz I was still struggling for speed at 1.30am last night.

is now a good time to mention i was uploading at > 140kb/s last night?

hooray!

Bighead

Which router did you buy in the end & was it expensive ?

k or K spud?

I don't think there's a resolution big enough to fit my penis on, i might have to use one of those photo stitching applications.

The router was a Linksys WAG54GS and so far its done a good job. I prioritised http traffic and what not, doesn't mind emule + news + games.

Anybody managed to figure out what speed to maintain for 8hrs so as to not quite hit 3gig ?

Try around the 100 to 110K mark and you should be fine.

Why bother, the speed you have to keep below is less than that of the reduction.

This site should help explain it all : http://abcde.co.uk/virginmedia/stm.html

kbyte/s

Thanks for the link PCA, thats cleared it all up

@Spud, nice, I can sustain an upload of 85K or over and still get decent download speeds. I am set to 768k upload, but strangely all tests I have so far performed point more towards around the 1000 mark.