UK Online is committed to ensuring our broadband services are quick and reliable for all of our customers.
In order to offer a high quality service at an affordable price, UK Online Broadband is 'contended'. This means that the available bandwidth is shared by all customers active at a particular point in time. Most Broadband services are contended with leased lines (at much higher prices) being uncontended. The lower the contention the better.
The contention rates differ depending on whether we deliver your service using our own network or BT's as we are able to offer much lower contention over our own network (20:1 rather than 50:1 over BT's network). Our consumer services are contended at 33:1 and 50:1 respectively.
Contention normally has little or no effect on the average user. However, when a customer's use of the service is highly excessive this can result in reduction of bandwidth for other users.
We rely on our users being fair and considerate of others in their broadband usage. If one person takes up much or all the bandwidth this results in a loss of service quality and speed for other users, and in some cases where one customer's usage is excessive to an extreme, this can have a long-lasting detrimental effect on both the rest of our users and our network.
The Fair Usage Policy informs our customers of the rules of contention and enables us to intervene if your usage (being the amount of downloading and/or uploading you perform) is consistently excessive, and adversely impacts our network and/or other users. If your usage is harming our network, or having a negative effect on other users, then we reserve the right to restrict your service.
How does this affect me?
Excessive use during peak time
We will monitor your Broadband usage during peak times from 5pm to 12am each day. This is when the majority of customers use the network and when speeds could be affected by the excessive usage of a minority. If we consider that your usage is excessive during peak times we may slow down your connection for the rest of the day so that it has less affect on others. Only a very small number of customers will be affected by this (less than 2%). If you are affected, we will only slow down the speed you can get during peak times for applications which use a lot of bandwidth (for example, streaming, peer-to-peer and newsgroups) and which have a negative effect on other customers. You will still be able to use Broadband to do other things normally such as browsing, email, instant messaging and VOIP. There are no restrictions in place outside of peak times.
Traffic management of our Network
To ensure we provide a sustainable quality broadband service to our customers, we continuously monitor and efficiently manage the Network as a whole. To do this, during peak times (from 5pm to 12am each day), we may slow down the speed that all customers can get on certain applications which we consider use up a lot of bandwidth (for example peer-to-peer and newsgroups) and which have a negative affect on other customers There are no restrictions in place for applications such as browsing, email, streaming, instant messaging and VOIP during peak times. We do not put restrictions on our network outside of peak times.
How do I know how much my usage is?
You can keep track of how much bandwidth you are using with any one of a range of Bandwidth Monitors (including some freeware versions) available to download online.
UK Online does not endorse any particular product or service and you should satisfy yourself that the service offered by these third parties is suitable for your needs. We will not be responsible for any dealings you have with any such third party provider and we do not have a relationship with any of them. You will be responsible for resolving any problems or issues with any third party service to which you subscribe directly with the provider and UK Online will not get involved. We make no warranty as to the accuracy or effectiveness of any such service.
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