Customers of Virgin Media UK's least supported Virgin National ( Virgin.net ADSL ) broadband service, which operates over BT's traditional telephone network and not Virgin's super-fast cable platform, have been told that the current lag (latency) problems being experienced by fans of World of Warcraft (a hugely popular online multiplayer game) should be resolved by the end of this month.

Online gamers are usually the first to notice when something goes wrong with their internet service because multiplayer gaming is highly sensitive to any change in latency, which is effectively the response time (in milliseconds / ms) for sending a packet of data between servers. A rise in latency can easily make many online games unplayable.

Sadly that is exactly what happened when Blizzard introduced its latest major patch (4.0.1) for the hugely popular World of Warcraft (WoW) Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game (MMORPG) during mid-October. Unfortunately this patch also made WoW's P2P based traffic look indistinguishable from vanilla P2P to Virgin's Traffic Management system, which has made the game almost unplayable for a whole month.


It originally took Virgin almost two weeks to issue a public response to the problem, which has generated a rather sizeable topic on their support forum. However the good news is that Virgin Media confirmed last week that the issue would soon be fixed, the bad news is that you'll have to wait until "the full fix for this problem at the end of November".

Virgin also claimed to have, "made some changes to the configuration of our traffic management system to try and improve [the] service," although customers have continued to report problems with WoW's performance. Virgin.net's difficulties have already caused some customers to leave and switch on to the rival Sky Broadband service.

Millions of people around the world, many of which are in the UK, play WoW and early next month will see the release of its biggest game expansion to date - WoW: Cataclysm. ISPs that make aggressive use of Traffic Management will all need to be prepared; otherwise they could end up stoking the fires beneath a traditionally highly vocal group of customers.