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A number of broadband subscribers of ISP Virgin.net have recieved a stark warning about their historical usage of the service.
The ISP which charges around £25 (inc VAT) for its 512k ADSL service released the following announcement to a selected quantity of its subscribers.
| Dear customer,
You may be aware that some Virgin.net Broadband customers are currently experiencing a deterioration in service performance.
The most significant reason for this is excessive bandwidth usage, where a minority of customers are constantly uploading and / or downloading really large files and thus clogging up the network.
So if you are a heavy Virgin.net Broadband user, it would really help if you could take it a bit easy. We are requesting that everyone reduces their levels of uploading / or downloading activity to 1 gigabyte a day up to a maximum of 5 gigabytes per week. This will enable us to get the system back up to speed and allow everyone to enjoy the service in full.
Otherwise, we may have to take drastic action and restrict usage. We would encourage you to visit the Virgin.net website for our Terms and Conditions regarding broadband usage with particular reference to Clauses F.16 and P.2 whereby Virgin.net reserves the right to temporarily suspend or to terminate accounts. This would obviously be a last resort for us and we hope that we do not have to take such action.If you have any questions on your broadband usage please see our FAQs or feel free to email us at broadband.assistance@virgin.net
Thank you,
Virgin.net
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| Virgin.net Service Announcement dated Thu, 27 Nov 2003. |
Virgin.net have further clarified this announcement with the following release.
| Virgin.net have contacted a proportion of their broadband customers and requested that they reduce their usage to a maximum of 1 gigabyte per day and 5 gigabytes per week. (This is enough to surf approximately 40,000 Internet pages and collect approximately 10,000 emails each day). |
| Virgin.net |
The announcement from Virgin.net mentions the collection of email and surfing websites, but nothing of other popular applications, such as Peer2Peer usage, VPN and audio / video streaming, which subscribers are fast considering to be the norm.
Following on from pressure lobbying groups such as as the now defunct Campaign for Unmetered Telecomunications, <a href="http://www.anticap.co.uk/" target="_blank"">Anticap has been established following the first public case of mass capping from Cable broadband provider NTL.
The theory of bandwidth capping is something of a sore point given the current market appetite for broadband connections. With sales pitches from ISPs either implying or quoting unlimited usage of their service, chronological capping of subscribers bandwidth is one 'service' that many subscribers would greet by voting with their feet and assisting in the increase of the ISPs churn rate. But for how long ? With bandwidth usaging become more of a valued commodity in the ISP market than it ever has before, are we likely to see more ISPs adopt this strategy, under the claim of network integrity? What is clear, is that there will always been two sides to the coin with low usage users or "bursty" users citing that network integrity is key to any decent service from ISPs. The other side of the coin will cite that their monthly subscription permits them to use their service how they like.
Middlesex based Metronet currently operates an "open policy" capping service in a attempt to attract subsribers to their service who want the benefits of a broadband connection - but who deem themselves to have little requirement for vast amounts of download capacity. Prices for Metronet start at £10 per month (plus VAT) for their 512k ADSL package for which includes 200MB of data download a month with subsequent MB's charged at £0.0025 per MB (2.5 pence per 10MB).
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