Virgin - unlimited means up to 75% throttling

[TeaLeaf]

http://hexus.net/business/news/telcos/53489-virgin-media-forced-drop-unlimited-broadband-ad-claim/

Interesting read on what the courts define as 'moderate' throttling.   Virgin lost the court case which used 50% throttling, but their new package seems to be deemed as reasonable and 'moderate' when it throttles at 40%.   The new terms still include up to 75% throttling though.

Download 1 x big WoW patch and you'd be throttled.   Personally I'd rather be clear and simple and if Virgin say "unlimited, no caps" then they ought to deliver.   If they can't, then they sure as heck should not advertise it as such when "unlimited, no caps" can still mean up to 75% throttling.

Full Virgin Terms

Summary tables:

[smilodon]

Virgin should be clear that they are selling a no cut off/no extra costs service. The benefit is that you'll never hit a bandwidth cap and find that either you have no Internet at all or a big fat bill coming your way. In that respect they are 'unlimited' but it's a very subjective word and I'm sure Virgin are happy for people to wrongly think they can use the Internet without restrictions.

For myself I just make any big downloads I need over night rather than at 7pm. I've gone over the limit several times but according to a Virgin bod they generally turn a blink eye unless they're seeing persistent high usage during the restricted times. I guess with 130mb/sec someone could open an Internet cafe' and resell the bandwidth?

What does annoy me is that Virgin don't provide any tools for seeing how much data I have used. So I really don't have any idea how close to a throttling threshold I am, all I do know is that I've never been capped so far.

[T-Bag]

It's really not hard to use up 4GB worth of internet. If you don't download these sorts of amounts then there's little point in having 60Mb broadband. Buying a typical mainstream steam game will use far more download than that. But this is hardly news, they've been told off for using the word unlimited in adverts, what they should have to do is offer an app that pops up a message saying if you're being throttled because it's not always clear if it's active throttling or just poor service.

[suicidal_monkey]

I've certainly experienced pretty severe throttling before, usually after downloading (party of) a new game or a few updates, to the point where the BBC iPlayer became almost unusable.

Annoyingly they're still better than the competition :sly: