UPD Virgin Media UK Add Traffic Management to 50Mb and 100Mbps Packages

Cable giant Virgin Media, fresh from doubling its UK customers broadband speeds (here) and revamping their bundles (here), has announced the introduction of Traffic Management on their 50Mbps and 100Mbps services. But it’s not all bad news as they’re reducing the downstream speed reduction on 30Mbps (Virgin’s new entry-level speed) and above from 75% to 50%.

Virgin also plans to trial “a variety of different approaches to traffic management over the coming months to make the system more intelligent and flexible, while ensuring the optimal quality of service“, which is allegedly being done as part of their speed doubling programme (more information should become available in the future).

Mark Wilkin, Virgin’s Forum Support Manager, said:

“As we begin migrating you to your new faster broadband speeds, we’re making some changes to our subscriber traffic management (STM) policies to help maintain the quality of broadband service you’ve come to expect.”

Full details of the changes are expected to be published on Virgin’s Traffic Management Page today and we’ll update once they’re available. At present there are no limits, except against P2P (File Sharing) traffic, on their 100Mbps service and only uploads are restricted on 50Mbps.

In fairness Virgin Media’s CEO, Neil Berkett, did warn at the launch of their original 50Mbps service a few years back that its Traffic Management policy would eventually be expanded to cover the faster speeds. Indeed it’s often the case that a small proportion of customers can consume an “unusually high amount” of bandwidth, which slows the service for others. Hence it often makes sense to impose some restrictions but doing so can cause confusion.

UPDATE 12:45pm

The new policy is out (linked in the original article above), though we suspect that many customers might find its explanations to be extremely confusing. The official page also squashes a lot of data into a very small space, which doesn’t help, so here’s the new PDF (Adobe Reader) versions that should be a little easier on the eyes.. and brain.

Traffic Management for 30Mbps+ Packages
http://shop.virginmedia.com/content/dam/allyours/pdf/Traffic%20Management%20Threshold_30.pdf

Traffic Management for 20Mbps and Below Packages
http://shop.virginmedia.com/content/dam/allyours/pdf/Traffic%20Management%20Threshold_20.pdf