What are the limits of unlimited broadband?

Most internet service providers have what they call fair-use policies, which let them restrict the connection speeds of their most bandwidth-hungry customers. One of them, Sky Broadband (owned by the same parent company as Times Online) recently raised eyebrows by lifting restrictions entirely for its Sky Max package. Industry commentators suggested that the offer would be unsustainable if it attracted too many heavy users, especially those downloading and sharing large amounts of video.

“It may become impossible for Sky to charge £10 a month and keep up with performance at current levels,” Sebastien Lahtinen, co-founder of Thinkbroadband.com, said. “With just a few heavy users there may not be a noticeable amount of congestion, but once the service becomes more popular this could change. This will then inevitably result in either an increase in price or the unlimited name tag being taken away.”

Sky isn't alone. Although Be Broadband does have a fair-use policy, it says it has only imposed restrictions once, when four exceptionally heavy users brought down the network. Virgin appeared to be the stingiest of the ISPs we surveyed, capping the top 5 per cent of users between 4pm and 9pm. Virgin should at least get some credit for being open about how it operate the policy. Other ISPs, including BT, say they have no hard-and-fast rules, making it difficult to assess how fairness or otherwise of their fair-use policies.

Here’s what the ISPs have to say:

Orange

Website: “If you don't use file sharing software or download large files from the internet it's unlikely you'll ever be affected by this policy. If you do, all we ask is that you do so considerately, perhaps by downloading outside the peak hours of 6pm to midnight. … If you only occasionally have very high usage, we're unlikely to be concerned. If it is happening regularly, we may either have to reduce the transmission speed of your broadband while we continue to keep an eye on your usage, or suspend your service and/or possibly close your account.”

Orange has not yet responded to a request for more specific details sent on Tuesday afternoon.

Be Broadband

Website: “If it’s felt that any Be member’s internet activities are so excessive that other members are detrimentally affected, Be may give the member generating the excessive web traffic a written warning (by email or otherwise). In extreme circumstances, should the levels of activity not immediately decrease after the warning, Be may terminate that member’s services.”

Asked for more specifics, Be Broadband said that it had no set limit on how much data a user could download. “We have only ever implemented the fair usage policy on one occasion (Dec 2007) when four users brought down our network,” Oli White, Be’s head of marketing, said. “In that case we thought that their usage had impacted every other member on the network.”

Virgin Media

Website: “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 automatically reduce the speed of the heaviest users at peak evening times - between 4pm and 9pm. In extreme cases, we'll now also reduce the speed between 10am and 3pm - something that'll have an impact on just 1% of our customers.”

A table at the bottom of this page gives full details of how the policy works.

Tiscali

Website: “This fair usage policy automatically identifies the very small number of extremely heavy users and manages their bandwidth only during peak hours (6pm to 11pm Monday to Sunday), to protect the service for all our other customers. Outside peak hours, the use of the internet by these heavy users is unaffected. … If your usage still remains excessive during peak hours [after two e-mail warnings about excessive use], we will contact you a third time to advise you that we will be restricting your bandwidth during peak hours for the good of all other customers. This restriction will only apply during peak hours and there will be no restriction at other times of the day.”

BT

Website: “BT continuously monitors network performance and may restrict the speed available to very heavy users during peak time. … Only a very small minority of customers will ever be affected by this (less than 1%). … There is no hard and fast usage limit that determines if you are a heavy user as the parameters that determine heavy use vary with the demands placed on the network at that given time.”

TalkTalk

TalkTalk has just updated its old fair-use policy, replacing it with this, which is not yet available on the company’s website:

“Previously our policy has been to identify high-bandwidth users and actively apply traffic shaping [i.e. restrictions] to their peer-to-peer traffic, but we have decided to implement an updated policy that delivers a dynamic and softer customer experience. So, instead of maintaining a window between 12 midnight and 7am when there was no shaping anywhere within the network we will dynamically shape the policy over a 24-hour period, protecting the peaks for the majority and progressively allowing more peer-to-peer outside of peak hours. This will deliver a smoother and seamless customer experience by removing the hard policy on and policy off times.”
   
TalkTalk said that the off-peak period would be longer under the new system, and that the company was happy for people to use peer-to-peer systems when bandwidth is available.

Comments

[broadbandguru]

I'm always wary when these providers talk of 'unlimited usage' as it is always too good to be true... as you say it will be impossible for sky to keep up this offer as it becomes more popular with customers.

[Gavin]

I have an account with T-Mobile, their most expensive tariff: business unlimited and once I went over 10Gb and I received a threatening letter saying my bandwidth would be reduced or capped if I do it again. What a misleading advert as I was not aware of the 10Gb limit, after all in other months I probably used 1Gb or 2Gb and when I needed to download many large files in this one particular month I get threatened!

[Les]

TalkTalk offered me a great deal and brought a second person on the line to make sure I understood the conditions. Despite this when a letter arrived it said 40gb/mth limit on an 18 month contract. So I cancelled.

[Martin Holt]

Not sure the Tiscali comment is entirely accurate. I work as an OU tutor and this particular provider was notorious in the tutor & student communities as a widespread throttler at peak times for normal use e.g. e-mail checking which is why I, like many others left them. This is also the provider who lost several days e-mails across the whole system and denied it until outed by Radio 4. Now with Be and have to say have been highly impressed with their level of service