Virgin Media has admitted it's restricting P2P uploads during peak times in a trial that the company plans to extend nationwide if it proves successful.

The ISP has long restricted download P2P traffic during peak hours to ensure a more consistent service for all customers, but the change to its terms marks a harder line approach and has already angered some customers – particularly online gamers.

“After the successful out of hours trial of our combined upstream and downstream file sharing traffic management policy we will be trialling this new policy between 17:00 and 00:00 (12:00 and 00:00 at weekends) for one week starting on Wednesday 2nd of March,” the company said in a statement tucked away on its website.

“Between these times, P2P and newsgroup upstream traffic will be managed in a similar way to our current downstream traffic management,” the company said. “If the trial is successful we'll launch the new policy immediately.”

Interestingly, the company appeared to be expecting mixed results, as it asked for feedback about specific services running under the traffic management, with special mention for gaming services, some of which also use P2P networking.

Gamers complaints

“We'd like to hear your feedback about how this affects your broadband connection and if this has any affect on your gaming experience online," Virgin said.

Gamers were certainly quick to take the company up on its suggestion, with a number of gamers posting about negative impacts on their services.

"I'm playing Rift and the game was fine, with no latency problems, then all of a sudden my game starts lagging out and nothing working," posted customer Del528 on a thread stretching over pages and featuring largely negative responses.

"I looked at my latency in game and it was varying from 560ms to 15,000ms, same again today. Is it a coincidence this is happening at the same time you start your trial? I don't think so. I pay money for a service from yourselves and you're failing."

Virgin Media later posted a response saying Rift traffic had been affected and was subsequently whitelisted, but complaints persisted about World of Warcraft.

http://www.pcpro.co.uk/news/broadband/3 ... ers-gamers

Left them for O2 and never looked back, even my idiotic father got shot of 'em...

Can't be any worse than say, BT, who are absolutely horrible in terms of gaming.