Virgin Media UK Begins Throttling P2P Traffic

UK Internet Service Provider (ISP) Virgin Media has announced that it will begin throttling both  P2P and Newsgroup traffic at "Peak" times it has emerged.
The ISP which advertises itself as "The fastest in the UK" and offers speeds of up to 100mb has said it needs to throttle  file sharing traffic to prevent slowness in other areas such as online multiplayer gaming.
Trialling of the new traffic management plans commenced on March 2 and will only apply to Upstream traffic, therefore download speeds will be unaffected. The clamp down will apply on top of the existing traffic shaping Virgin Media has in place and will affect all packages, including the previously unmanaged 100mb deal.
A message on the Virgin Media site read
"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 for one week starting on Wednesday 2nd of March.
Between these times  P2P and Newsgroup upstream traffic will be managed in a similar way to our current downstream traffic management. If the trial is successful we'll launch the new policy immediately.
We're interested if you could tell us how this affects your gaming experience over the next few days and if you see any general improvement in latency and ping at peak times."
The move comes as a surprise to many as Virgin already manage traffic between 4pm and 8pm. Virgin Medias website details their  file sharing traffic management policy and says;
"We moderate the total volume of  file sharing traffic on our network between 5pm and midnight on weekdays and midday and midnight on weekends. This policy, which applies to all broadband packages, is restricted to Peer to Peer ("P2P") applications and Newsgroups (which are commonly used to distribute large amounts of data). This policy does not impact any applications other than Peer to Peer and Newsgroups, so things like watching iPlayer, online gaming, making calls via Skype, downloading music tracks from iTunes or streaming them from Spotify and sending an email or normal browsing are unaffected."
So there you have it, Virgin Media ARE the UK's fastest Broadband Provider, but only because they decided what you can do and when you can do it.