i have been with the preamum pack for a week now and have d/l afew games yet i have not yet been over the 1mb/s speed

im with virginmeadia 50MB and i know my connection is fine as i usally get a connection of 4.7-5mb/s

i have been d/l Perimeter for the last 2 hr's give or take its at 75% now and i havent seen it go over 500kbs its got an avrage of 200kbs

Hi and welcome to the service.

There are many things that can affect download speeds.

Personally atm im downloading at 1800kbps which is pretty much the top whack speed i get from my isp so i dont think this is an issue with meta,I have allready got perimeter downloaded so cant test that particular game.

There used to be many documented issues for people using the service that were using virgin media as an isp.Try looking at this thread regarding virgin media's traffi shaping policies etc. post294028.html?hilit=virgin&sid=d5152739fa28c5374e60e5894a760d4f#p294028

You could ty running a traceroute to the meta servers to see if there is an issue between you and the meta servers but i rather suspect it is vm's traffic shaping at work here.To run a trace route do the following

Start -> Run -> cmd (press enter)

In the window that appears:

tracert http://www.metaboli.co.uk (press enter)

Post the results

One thing you could do to try and make downloading games that are slow at downloading less painfull is to play a game while another is downloading.To do this goto the site and launch the game that you want to play.Then alt/tab back to the desktop and navigate to the site and start downloading the game you want to download then maximize the game you allready have running and there you go

Tracing route to metauk.srvc.metaboli.net [193.23.227.204]
over a maximum of 30 hops:

1 1 ms <1 ms <1 ms 192.168.1.1
2 8 ms 7 ms 9 ms cpc2-sotn8-2-0-gw.15-1.cable.virginmedia.com [80
.3.190.1]
3 12 ms 5 ms 7 ms sotn-core-1a-ge-400-1597.network.virginmedia.net
[80.4.225.57]
4 11 ms 11 ms 11 ms winn-bb-1a-ae1-0.network.virginmedia.net [212.43
.163.149]
5 11 ms 71 ms 14 ms popl-bb-1b-as5-0.network.virginmedia.net [212.43
.162.194]
6 84 ms 11 ms 14 ms popl-bb-1a-ae0-0.network.virginmedia.net [213.10
5.174.229]
7 13 ms 10 ms 46 ms popl-tmr-1-ae4-0.network.virginmedia.net [213.10
5.159.2]
8 21 ms 18 ms 19 ms amst-ic-1-as0-0.network.virginmedia.net [213.105
.175.6]
9 20 ms 19 ms 19 ms amsix1.eun.ams.as8218.eu [195.69.145.47]
10 19 ms 21 ms 23 ms xe0-0-0.tcr1.tc2.ams.as8218.eu [83.167.55.91]
11 28 ms 28 ms 39 ms xe2-2-0.tcr1.rb.par.as8218.eu [83.167.63.226]
12 28 ms 28 ms 36 ms xe2-2-0.ter2.eqx2.par.as8218.eu [83.167.56.217]

13 30 ms 28 ms 26 ms 83.167.57.170.static.neotelecoms.com [83.167.57.
170]
14 40 ms 35 ms 35 ms all.metaboli.co.uk [193.23.227.204]

Trace complete.

as for speed throttling i dont get it on 50Mb line

and for playing games it stops d/l alltogether or if i force it to start it will d/l at less then 100kbs

Hi

Your trace does not look too bad.There is one node that is a little slower than the rest but overall it looks ok to me.Your response times to meta look ok though.

Did you try checking your download speed with the service at the time of running the traceroute?

As far as your isp not speed throttling or at least having a fair usage policy that might throttle you i would be somewhat surprised.Im pretty sure they used to

If you and your neighbour both had virgin as an isp and you were on your 50 meg and your neighbour was on 20 meg in theory you could have a far larger impact on your neighbours speed than he could have on yours so i would be surprised if there was no fup that restricts your speeds at certian times if you went over a certian limit.The isp im with subject people to a fup for dloads over 300gig a month.

The following statement is taken from virgin media's own site

Our Traffic Management Policy is used every day to make sure our service is fair for everybody. We sometimes moderate the speeds for the top 5% of customers who are downloading and/or uploading an unusually large amount. We do this to try to make sure that the service doesn't get blocked up with people using more than their fair share - which means a lot fewer traffic jams.

If this was meta restricting speed then i would have thought i would have seen slow speeds at the same time you did and i didnt.

Are you getting slow speeds all the time or just at certian times of the day?

You could try checking your system for spyware etc to see if it helps improve things.I use advanced system care for this which is free and available from http://www.iobit.com

i usally play at silly hr in the morning and night as its 6AM now its kinda odd that i will get throttled

i have allways had that slow d/l speed i finnally got 1.5Mb wile d/l the new release Ghost Pirates of Vooju Island

I'm on Virgin 50Mbit also. Speeds can vary - bear in mind that Metaboli's servers are based in France, so there is a little more infrastructure between 'us' and 'them'. They've had issues in the past with their ISP not talking nicely with UK ISP's (Damn Fro... er... ahem).

Anyway, most of the time the download speed is somewhere between 10 and 30 Mbit. I have noticed that different games will give different download speeds - this seems to be very random, and mostly irreproducible.

As I've just re-built my machine, I have downloaded a lot of games recently, and I wouldn't say I've any complaints - sure, it could be faster, but what couldn't? There's so little out there that actually can saturate a 50Mbit connection...

I'm hoping, however, that whatever new software they've got up their sleeves (Big announcement deal, etc.) will include a multi-channel downloader, so we can get full speed downloads

Oh - and as to the no throttling - that is a feature of the Virgin Media 50Mbit service. There is no traffic management on the 50Mbit service, whereas there is on the 30, 20, 10 and 2 services. It's another reason for them to charge so much for it

You may wish to try downloading from Steam some-times... that can come down at just 2-4Mbit... or can do 40Mbit.

steam gives me 40-50Mb speeds

now this new thing about a multi-channel downloader thing sounds intresting

but ya the 50MB is abit overpriced lol but u get what u pay for usally

i know the server is in france somewere but i still d/l faster from most places geting a max of 1.5-2mb is really slow

Virgin is strange sometimes.

Usually it's ok but lately I've been finding that the speed is severely choked during evenings and I'm on 50Mb as well.

At nights I get a lighting fast connection to the Speedtest's test server in Milton Keynes but rubbish to the London one (which you get a good one to). I get superfast speed to servers in Germany and Sweden but Paris sucks.

However sometimes the download speed from Metaboli is 4.8Mb/s on some of the bigger games whereas some of the older ones I get 300Kb/s.

Steam usually fires off at 4Mb/s and then eventually slows down to about 800Kb/s after about 20 mins download. Usually the game is down by then but if the game is exceedingly large it can sometimes take much longer as speed drops.

The odd thing is that I also have an 8Mb connection with Sky and I get a consistent 780Kb/s download through there no matter where I'm downloading from.

I have noticed one thing though... if I have Hamachi switched on, the internet connection is much slower than with it turned off.