Virgin Media are set to target the top 2% of its customers who use the most bandwidth on it’s network. Virgin believes these customers are detrimental to it’s network and other users. Currently it has been the top 5% of users who have been targeted but Virgin are now going to concentrate on the top 2% who they say use upload and download unusually large amounts.
The “penalty” for being in this group is likely to be the throttling of their broadband connection during peak hours and thus reducing the bandwidth available to them.
The following has been added to the Acceptable Use Policy that Virgin Media have on their site:
3.2.1. Virgin Media does not place a limit on monthly network usage. However, in isolated cases (currently less than 0.1% of customers) where excessive network usage at busy times (9am to 9pm) is having a detrimental effect on other users, we may need to take appropriate action in accordance with the terms of this AUP to notify users of the impact they are having and require them to move some of their activity into the less busy period.
The customers who are likely to be affected are those who use P2P and file sharing which use up allot of bandwidth.
The reduction of targeting the top 5% down to top 2% is likely to have come about with Virgin completing it’s DOCSIS 3 network which is offering 50Mb broadband and has tripled the available bandwidth they have available.