Broadband Fair Use Policy
Why do we have a fair usage policy?
Hostit4u Broadband is committed to ensuring our customers receive the best broadband performance for a competitive price.
To achieve this goal we provide a contended broadband service. This means our Internet bandwidth
is shared with all our customers at any one point in time. The amount that we contend will depend on whether you are a business or residential customer and the type of service you buy from us.
Contention is a proven method for providing fast and cost effective services and is used by nearly
every broadband service provider in the UK.
However, a small number of customers use more than their “fair share” of Internet bandwidth during peak hours. We often see less than 1% of customers using a disproportionate amount
of Internet bandwidth during peak hours. These customers degrade the performance of our broadband service by taking bandwidth away from customers who use the service fairly.
In summary, we wish to be fair to you and our services are “unlimited” for normal usage at home or
your place of work.
How will I be affected?
You will only be affected by the fair usage policy if you use file sharing software such as peer
to peer (p2p), file transfer (ftp) or binary newsgroups (USENET) during peak periods.
If you exceed the fair usage limit for your product then your broadband contention will be increased and the performance of your broadband will degrade. We will email you to confirm you have exceeded your fair usage limit. Restrictions will only be applied if you exceed your peak time limit in two consecutive months.
At the end of the month, your fair usage limits are reset and your broadband contention will return to normal. We will not email you to confirm your fair usage limits have been reset.
How do I change my behaviour?
If you wish to use file sharing applications without being affected by the fair usage policy, simply schedule your file sharing to operate outside of peak hours (i.e. midnight until 7am is
the best time).
Applicable products
The fair usage policy currently relates to the Home Broadband service only. The table below shows
the number of gigabytes (GB) per month that maybe transferred during peak hours which are from
6pm until midnight every day.
| Home Broadband |
Peak Limit |
Off Peak Limit |
|
| Basic (BBI-1) |
20GB |
None |
|
| Gold (BBI-2) |
30GB |
None |
|
| Platinum (BBI-3) |
40GB |
None |
|
| Evolution (BBI-4) |
50GB |
None |
|
The Home Broadband product is charged according to the number of gigabytes that you transfer every month and consequently a fair usage policy does not apply.
Fair usage for business customers using the Business Broadband products are handled on a case
by case basis as we appreciate that customers manage their Internet usage within their business. Business products must not be used by residential customers who wish to use file sharing
applications.
Can you give a specific figure for the performance of your service?
Eclipse 2000 Broadband has introduced a new structure of broadband packages based on performance. This is very different to the old ‘contention ratio’ method, which is no longer
used by the industry for 8Mbps services. Therefore, we are unable to give a specific ratio figure as this will vary from minute to minute depending on the number of people using our network.
Our Fair Usage Policy operates in addition to our broadband performance system.
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