Virgin Media to impose Restriction on Peak Time P2P Traffic

Virgin Media, the cable broadband giant of the United Kingdom looks all set to ompose a fresh broadband traffic management regime on filesharing (P2P) and upstream traffic during the hours between 5 pm to midnight.

It is understood that the move would boost the performance of other non-filesharing services such as multiplayer online gaming that has apparently been impacted by heavy filesharing uploading activity.

The existing peak time policy of Virgin Media or the management of upstream traffic runs from 3 pm to 8 pm, except on the conventional 2Mbits legacy broadband service where this period falls between 9 am and 9 pm.

It is noteworthy here that a number of multiplayer online games such as World of Warcraft, XBox Live titles and others are intriguingly dependent on P2P performance. Nevertheless, Virgin Media should be able to come up with exceptions for these.

Virgin Media has stated on the status update that following their success in the out of hours pilot of their combined upload and download filesharing traffic management policy, they would be trialling the new policy between 5 pm and midnight for a week starting Wednesday March 2.