[Bullfrog]

I believe you broadbandings. To be fair I expect they are trying to solve the problem of people abusing the contention issue. The thing is they are trying to sell more bandwidth than they have got in the first place. If everyone with 10 & 20Mbit used their BB fully at the same time, the system would collapse.

Virgin rely on people not using it at the same time to offer such high bandwidths. Unfortunately the throttle setting they use to make sure that doesnt collapse is 25% of the bandwidth we paid for. That is too big a difference and will cause people who want medium usage to migrate to services which dont have a limit and which operate at the speed they say they operate 100% of the time because 100% of 4 mbit is better than 25% of 10Mbit.

Since Virgins throttle speed has to compete with constant connections with more realistic advertised speeds the throttle should be higher (about 50%) IMHO.

More than that, because the throttle is so slow, for medium users Virgins advertised speed is misrepresentation and they do try to hide it in the package details by omitting it. Virgin Broadband should be given a ticking off by trading standards. The least Virgin should do is publish the limits openly on the package pages. But they know that people will go elsewhere if they do. They are currently relying on inertia and deception because their throttling is not competitive and that is their mistake, in the long run it wont work.

EDIT: Be Unlimited for example has unlimited 24/1.3 mbit for £18 using ADSL2+ LLU, cheaper and faster than Virgin L and less hassle. Speedtest for Be Unlimited in my region is much better than Virgins. Only snag is you have to ditch your Virgin phone line to get it, oh wait that is not a snag for me is it?! Its just a snag for Virgin as they stand to lose cable and phone customers unless they figure out which way is up.