Traffic Management

1. Why do we manage Traffic?

Our broadband service is provided over a shared network. This means we have to manage traffic to make sure our customers receive a quality and sustainable broadband service.

Traffic Management lets us:

• Make sure time-sensitive traffic (like VoIP, VPN and gaming) is always prioritised - if these run slowly, they won’t work properly
• Protect interactive applications like web-browsing and email from non-time sensitive download traffic
• Provide a service relative to the amount each customer pays in terms of usage and experience
• Flex the network in the event of unusual demands in traffic or disaster situations (e.g. a network failure)

We think that our customers should know exactly what to expect from our broadband products. Most ISPs manage traffic in some way, we're one of the few who will share the details with their customers.

2. How does it work?

We use two methods to manage traffic on our network:

• Traffic Prioritisation
• Rate Limiting

Priority and rate limits may change if our network is extremely busy, read Managing our Network Under Abnormal Load for more information.

Traffic Prioritisation

All traffic on our network is prioritised by type. Higher priority traffic gets bandwidth before lower priority traffic. As the total bandwidth available is shared, this mean lower priority traffic can be slower at busy times when there's less bandwidth available.

Read our Traffic Prioritisation Guide to find out more on the different priority levels and how traffic is assigned.

Rate Limiting

Rate limits are applied to certain types of traffic. These vary according to the time of day and broadband account being used.

Read our Download and Upload Speed guides to find out how rate limiting is applied:

• Broadband Download Speeds
• Broadband Upload Speeds

This page last updated 27th November 2009