New Media Technology News
New Media Technology News

Virgin Media Throttling P2P Traffic

Virgin Media announced it will throttle both P2P and Newsgroup traffic at peak times to prevent slowness in other areas such as online multiplayer gaming.

Trialing of the new traffic management plans started on March 2 and only applys to upstream traffic, download speeds will be unaffected.

The new traffic management plans will apply on top of the existing traffic shaping Virgin Media has in place and will affect all packages, including the previously unmanaged 100mb service.

Virgin Media said:

“After the successful out of hours trial of our combined upstream and downstream file sharing traffic management policy we will be trialling this new policy between 17:00 and 00:00 for one week starting on Wednesday 2nd of March.

Between these times P2P and Newsgroup upstream traffic will be managed in a similar way to our current downstream traffic management. If the trial is successful we’ll launch the new policy immediately.

We’re interested if you could tell us how this affects your gaming experience over the next few days and if you see any general improvement in latency and ping at peak times.

We moderate the total volume of file sharing traffic on our network between 5pm and midnight on weekdays and midday and midnight on weekends. This policy, which applies to all broadband packages, is restricted to Peer to Peer (“P2P”) applications and Newsgroups (which are commonly used to distribute large amounts of data). This policy does not impact any applications other than Peer to Peer and Newsgroups, so things like watching iPlayer, online gaming, making calls via Skype, downloading music tracks from iTunes or streaming them from Spotify and sending an email or normal browsing are unaffected.”

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