Virgin to cut heavy downloaders' speeds

Virgin Media has confirmed that it will rollout a traffic management system designed to reduce the downstream speed of customers who download lots of data during peak hours.

The cableco defines peak as between 4pm and midnight, and claimed that only the top 5% of downloaders on each speed tier would be affected. Customers on tier M who download over 350MB during peak will have their downstream speed reduced to 1Mbps and their upstream restricted to 128Kbps for four hours. Customers on tier L who download over 750MB during peak will have their downstream reduced to 2Mbps and their upstream restricted to 192Kbps. Customers on Virgin's flagship XL service who download over 3GB during peak will be restricted to 5Mbps down/256Kbps up.

The traffic management system is being implemented at the same time as 20Mbps downstream services are being rolled out to XL tier subscribers.