Virgin Media throttles broadband speeds by up to half

Virgin Media has put a traffic management policy in place which could throttle its broadband customers' download speeds by up to half.

The updated policy was brought into place yesterday and will throttle both download and upload speeds if users go beyond a usage allowance. If the cap is broken then a speed reduction will take place for five hours.

Usage will be monitored daily between 10am and 3pm, then 4pm to 9pm. However, customers will have to have to use between 3.5GB and 20GB of data, depending on their package, during these times to trigger the throttle. This is the first time subscribers to 50Mb and 100Mb have had traffic management.

Virgin Media said: "The policy has been designed to reduce the impact of the top 5% of heaviest users on a daily basis, reducing the detrimental affect of these customers’ extreme usage on network performance and the service other customers receive."

For more information please visit: http://www.pcadvisor.co.uk/news/broadband/3348732/virgin-media-throttles-broadband-speeds-by-up-half/

Source: PC Advisor (http://www.pcadvisor.co.uk/)