Im really fed up with virgin. I have just come home from work and set about checking the news and doing other geeky stuff. My 10 year old stepson was complaining that his game (mir2 was lagging. We rebooted the PC and thought nothing more of it. He was still complaining it was slow so I did an online speedtest (http://gadgetshow.five.tv/jsp/speed_test.htm), this one in particular I have been running regularly for a few weeks now, becuase of constant speed issues. It reported less than 400k download, with an upload of just over 100k. GRR!! Why? It would seem we have been ‘managed’ ie. our net connection limited due to high bandwidth usage. On my network, I run a firewall box (IPCOP) so I can reliably tell EXACTLY how much downstream and upstream traffic we have had in any time period. Todays is as follows:

RED Interface: Input: 123.743 OUtput: 863.809 (MB)

So today (since 12:00am) ‘we’ have uploaded 863MB and downloaded 123MB. I would say that is about normal for a house with 2 computers and a laptop.

So lets see what Virgin have to say: (We’re on package ‘M’)

Broadband Size: M
During peak times, the top 5% on the Size: M package download at least 350MB of traffic each.

is that ALL???

Any users hitting this amount during peak times (4pm till midnight) will have their broadband speed temporarily traffic managed – their download speed will be set to 1Mb, with their upload speed set to 128Kb. This will last for 4 hours from when the traffic management policy is applied.

1Mb my arse!!! try 400k!

So now I have an issue. Should I ring virgin up and complain?

Read more on Virgins Traffic Management: http://allyours.virginmedia.com/html/internet/traffic.html