Would you class more than 3.5GB of monthly data as “excessive”? Well, Virgin Media doesn’t seem to think that. At least not when selling their SIM-only packages. As an example, you can buy a 4GB plan for £15 per month or an 8GB plan for £23 per month. This’ll get you unlimited texts and calls too. However, if you dive into the terms and conditions you’ll find that 3.5GB suddenly, actually, does become “excessive”. Under the pay monthly T’s & C’s it clearly states that…
For customers who joined Virgin Media after 25 June 2012 excessive use over 3.5GB of data per calendar month will result in their maximum bandwidth being restricted to 3G speeds (384kbit/s downstream, 200kbit/s upstream) on our network. For customers who joined before 25 June 2012 excessive use over 2GB of data per calendar month will result in this restriction being applied. This policy will apply until the end of the calendar month, when it will be automatically removed. We reserve the right to review these usage levels from time to time. At this reduced speed, customers will still be able to browse web pages, send/receive emails, and stream audio and video all at 3G data speeds, but peer-to-peer and large file downloads/uploads will be slower than normal.
So, if you have either the 4GB or 8GB plan on SIM only, get ready for it to switch down to lowly 3G when you’re part way through your allowance.
Seems a bit bizarre really, and we had to do some checking because we weren’t even totally sure whether Virgin Media were offering 4G data, but it appears that they are now doing that.
We’ve contacted Virgin Media about this and will let you know if they respond.