Virgin Media’s traffic shaping has recently got even worse, with throttling kicking in during the day as well as the evening if you download or upload too much.
VM effectively reduced the capacity of the connection from 20Mb to around 16Mb, although in practice it’s much lower than even that since if you do get throttled the connection becomes unusably poor so you have to avoid it by reducing speeds even further.
Naturally, they didn’t put the price down, although they are doing a deal for new customers of around £22/month at the moment for XL so I demanded to be put on that. I guess being loyal for years doesn’t deserve any kind of reward.
My reaction to the new limits has been to download more during peek times. I used to configure uTorrent to simply stop all downloading in the evening (peek time), which must have been ideal for VM as that is their real crunch time. Speeds in the evening are often quite poor, with YouTube videos not playing back properly etc.
I now set uTorrent to carry on downloading, but at a reduced speed so as not to get throttled. This is obviously worse for VM, but fuck ‘em. If their answer is to just keep reducing the level of service I’m not going to do anything to help them voluntarily.
If only I lived nearer to the exchange, I’d switch to Be. In fact, I’m tempted to try it just to see what speed I get, because if it’s more than about 10Mb then combined with a 2.5Mb upload it should be a lot better than VM for BitTorrent.