Order of the Bath

I’m a bit behind on this news but it shows how good Virgin are at keeping their customers informed about what is going on. They have now come clean about how they manage traffic for their heaviest users. I have checked the Acceptable Usage Policy and Terms of Service again and nothing has changed there so I still don’t think it is justified, but at least we now know what is being done. It seems that on the (L) package I am allowed a maximum of 800MB down or 325MB up between 4pm and 9pm. But some things do get better:—I see that I am now only paying £16 for the service which was £25 and it has just been announced that they are to uprate it to 10Mbps (and 512Kbps up) some time soon.

I don’t think that I am likely to hit the limits but I now wonder how I can monitor my usage—somehow I need to watch traffic through my router as there are multiple machines using it. The 800MB limit amounts to only an average of about 350Kbps over the 5 hours. It would be quite easy to exceed that with a torrent running and even easier to exceed the upload margin.

Update: Virgin media is a strange organisation. When I checked my account I found that I was still being charged £25. The Customer Care desk didn’t know anything about the £16 price so they forwarded me to customer relations. They checked the web site, consulted the supervisor and said—”That’s fine, we will apply it to your account straight away.” Not just the £16 per month but the £11.50 for the first year special offer, and a rebate on the month just paid in advance as well. I suppose that because they are over charging the many people that don’t know about it they can afford to be generous! The only small catch is that a 12 month contract starts again but at that price I am not at all bothered.

This entry was posted on 29 Jan 2008 at 11:55 by Rick and is filed under Miscellaneous. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.