As per the new traffic shaping policies of Virgin Media, its customers of 30 Mbps broadband will have only half the speed for five hours if they exceed the allotted usage allowance.


Broadband services are shared resources. Thus the traffic management policy of any service provider ensures that most of the consumers are able to avail high speed broadband. Traffic management of the network is indeed a challenge considering the speed offered.

Virgin Media’s upgrade will increase the speed by at least 100 percent.

Virgin has been going ahead with traffic management policies since 2007. As a result of it, there is restriction for peer to peer service (P2P) on some of it broadband plans sometime during the day.

A subscriber enjoying 50 Mbps speed will get only 25 Mbps between 10 am and 3 pm if the usage allowance prior to the upgrade is crossed. Between 4pm and 9 pm if the original allowance of 5 GB is exceeded caps come into play. Between 3 pm and 4 pm there is no restriction.

In the case of those who have already got their speed upgraded, when they are subject to a five hour traffic cap, their speed will reduce to their original speed. It has also found that only about 3% of the customers of the service providers have their connections subjected to throttling everyday.

The consumers with download speed of 20 Mbps and below will have their speed reduced to even 25%.

Other providers like BT Infinity Service is also planning for speed upgrade. They adopt traffic throttling to control the bandwidth needed by applications and services like P2P sharing.