UK Blogs

When choosing a Broadband Internet Provider, many of us don’t do any research into the providers available.

Virgin Media Broadband appears to be the best in terms of speed for many of us; however Virgin Media appear to be over subscribing its services in some areas which means poor speeds for its existing customers.

I am on a 20Mb Package with Virgin Media and we don’t always get a consistent speed of 20Mbs, sometimes this can drop to between 2Mbps to 5Mbps.

Below are some speed test results which were produced on Sunday 22^nd August 2010

So I was getting very near the max speed for my package at the time of this test, now let’s look at the ping test results

Ping tests are the main thing that keeps jumping up and down and this is the main issue that affects people when playing games over the internet.

Traffic Management Policy
http://allyours.virginmedia.com/html/internet/traffic.html

The annoying factor with Virgin Media is its Traffic Management Policy, it places a limit on downloads between the hours of 10am to 3pm and 4pm to 9pm 7 days per week. if you exceed the download limit for your chosen package within the time slots of the traffic management. Your speed will be reduced by 75% for 5 hours. so if you are on the 20mb package and you download more then 3500mb between the hours of 4pm to 9pm, your speed will be reduced down to 5mbps for 5 hours before being reset back to full speed.

If you are a heavy internet user and regularly exceed the limit set by your package. Then you may need to upgrade to the top package that Virgin Media provides and that’s the 50mb package starting from £28 per month.

At the moment Virgin Media do not apply its Traffic Management Policy on the 50mb package, however this may change in the future.

Deep Packet Inspection

Virgin Media have been secretly using Deep Packet Inspection to monitor its customer’s internet usage. This would mean any websites you visit or download from, Virgin Media will be able to see what you are doing. Its worrying to think that Virgin Media could find out your username and passwords for internet banking services. 

Virgin Media do not inform its customers if they are monitoring your connection and usage and claims they are only looking to see if you are downloading copyrighted materials.

Privacy campaigners said they were "very disappointed" that Virgin Media is performing the trial without gaining customer consent, and that this may breach European privacy law.

"We're very disappointed that Virgin Media will start trialling the technology," said Alex Hanff of NoDPI. "We feel this breaches the e-Privacy Directive, which says interception of communications requires either consent or a warrant."

Hanff compared the trial to those of Phorm's behavioural advertising technology by BT in 2006 and 2007, which were performed without customer consent. The UK government was told by the European Commission in October that it must strengthen UK privacy safeguards in light of the Phorm trials.

Virgin Media told ZDNet UK it had taken legal advice, and that the trial would not contravene the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (Ripa) or the Data Protection Act (DPA).

Under the Privacy and Electronic Communications (EC Directive) Regulations (PECR) and the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (RIPA) as well as the European ePrivacy Directive, that interception and processing of communications requires either explicit informed consent from all parties or a warrant.

It should be noted that there is no exemption in the regulations for the purpose of detecting illicit copyright infringement – and indeed in such cases where interception is being used for law enforcement, a warrant is required.

Virgin Media’s plans assume that all consumers are guilty of copyright infringement until their communications data proves otherwise – whereas the onus should be on the injured parties to provide their own evidence that an infringement has occurred. 

Let us know your thoughts?