A trial run by Virgin Media to see the effects of a proposed combined upstream and downstream file sharing traffic management policy has caused problems with online gamers countrywide.

Conducting the P2P throttling trial from Wednesday 2 March for a week, between the hours of 5pm and midnight each weekday, and 12pm and midnight on the weekend, the service provider invited comments from game players who had been negatively affected: "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 company said on its community pages.

This resounded in many, often angry, responses:

"Well im used to the slow speeds on virgin, but yesterday was abysmal," said STARSBarry. "I was gonna write a nice long reply.... but the internet was so bad it took 15 minutes to load every forum page and half the time cut out.... funnly enough starting exactly the same time your trial took place.... just a heads up but can you make sure you didnt hit the switch marked all internet instead of just the one marked P2P? also on rift report..... normally its bad but yesterday it was even worse, as in steady ms of around 3k spiking to 50k (normaly its 300ms peak time spiking to 30k)."

Rnosa also posted, "On topic - This trial is a fail as I can not play games or use my internet for what it is supposed to be used for in the evening."

The main complaints revolve around the P2P-specific MMORPG Rift, which suffered in performance levels throughout the trial, although World of Warcraft was also hit as it uses P2P file sharing for the distribution of updates, patches and the like.

We even experienced some troubles ourselves, with Pingtest.net reporting a fail (F) during the trials.

Did you have adverse effects on your Virgin Media broadband connection over the last 7 days? Let us know in the new comment structure below (you'll need to be registered with Disqus first)...