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Virgin Media sets throttle on hardcore hogs

Virgin Media's bandwith throttling policy will in future be more targeted towards the minority of customers the firm says "hammer" its network.

It said its 50Mbit/s network upgrade programme, now completed, will allow it to restrict bandwidth during peak times for 2 per cent of customers rather than the current 5 per cent.


Within that group Virgin Media plans to contact a "hardcore" of users, who have disproportionate impact on the network through heavy BitTorrent and newsgroup downloading, to demand they ease off. The firm has made a change to its acceptable use policy to codify the policy.

It now reads: "In isolated cases (currently less than 0.1 per cent 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."

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