Traffic management: lolling your speed
Although ‘unlimited’ broadband services have no monthly cap, they’re almost always governed by ‘fair use’ limits and traffic management policies, which could mean you’re denied your full line speed because you use the service more than most.
For example, Virgin ‘moderates’ the speeds of cable customers who download or upload large amounts of data during peak periods. 50Mbit customers aren’t affected, but as network improvements bring upload speeds up to 5Mbit, that benefit will be taken away again for users who upload heavily, with speeds throttled back to 1.75Mbit.
How much is too much? Users on the 20Mbit tariff can only download 3.5GB during peak hours before having their speed cut for the rest of the period. Virgin says this is enough for five movies; it means streamed movies, at relatively low quality. Downloaded iTunes movies range from around 1.2 to 2 GB each. Many creative pros will also need to download and, more challengingly, upload projects bigger than this.
More worryingly still for some users, Virgin admits that it selectively slows down traffic to and from file sharing services such as BitTorrent, Limeware and Gnutella at peak times, regardless of how much you’re personally using them. This is contrary to the principle of net neutrality, but many ISPs have similar policies on their ADSL tariffs.
O2 throttles both video streaming and file sharing (via specific websites). On its ‘All Rounder’ tariff, peer-to-peer file sharing is limited to a glacial 0.25 Mbit, falling to just 0.1Mbit at ‘busy times’. Video is limited to 8 Mbit, out of a maximum of 24Mbit. Even ‘The Works’, which generally doesn’t limit usage at all, applies the 0.25Mbit throttle to P2P at busy times. Meanwhile, Virgin’s peak hours are 4pm to 9 pm on weekdays, Cte’s ‘busy times’ are 4pm to midnight plus 12pm to midnight at weekends – more than a third of the whole time.
The Ofcom code of practice says ISPs must make information about traffic management ‘prominently’ available on their websites. In practice, it can be hard to find and poorly explained. ISPs are also supposed to email you to tell you if your service is being throttled due to excessive use. Few appear to have a policy of doing so. You can find out more about the Ofcom code of practice atbitly.
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