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Virgin Media, the UK’s fastest ISP, are well known for being the only cable provider in Britain offering speeds of up to 50 Mbps in selected areas.
However, Virgin are also well known for being very stringent with the traffic management, severely limiting the speeds of users who try to download more than a few gigabytes of data during the day and only allowing unlimited downloads in the late evening and early morning when network strain is at its lowest.
This throttling has been getting gradually worse even as the speeds available to customers become faster. However, there’s good news today as Virgin have announced that the limits have been relaxed for customers on their ‘L’ and ‘XL’ packages. These customers will find themselves able to download more during the day than they could before, and customers on the Virgin 50mb package should now be enjoying totally unrestricted downloads.
A Virgin Media Spokesperson commented: “Today’s changes highlight how the major investment in our new network is enabling all customers to enjoy the best of today’s web, whether viewing full screen HD video on a PC or unlimited downloads. Few of our competitors’ broadband is fast enough for these applications and some of our competitors actually block higher speed applications and charge customers when they download too much.”
While these raised limits should benefit some users, there are other groups that believe that any traffic management at all on a package that advertises itself as unlimited is unfair. Michael Phillips, Product Director at a popular comparison website stated: “It’s good to see Virgin Media loosening the reins a little for customers on its L and XL packages. However, we still believe that marketing ‘unlimited’ broadband, when there is in fact traffic management in place can be misleading for customers who haven’t read the small print.”
Virgin users will be happy at the news as will anyone who is considering cable as an option for their home broadband connection. However, with a 75% drop in speed if you go over Virgin’s limits, we recommend downloading a bandwidth monitoring program to keep track of all the data running through your home network regardless of how high Virgin set their limits.
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