subject: 'broadband Hogs' Myth Restricting Uk Broadband Connections [print this page] FAIR use policies, so often the bane of many a broadband user have come under attack after the justification for their existence - to control 'broadband hogs' - was rubbished as a 'myth'.
'Broadband hogs' are users whose activities are deemed to have a detrimental effect on the broadband network for the majority users.
Broadband and telecoms blog Fiber Evolution argued that the 'excessive' activities of a small number of broadband users was not the reason for congestion occurring across world networks but instead that under investment and restrictive policing of bandwidth by broadband providers was to blame.
The UK's broadband con?
Fiber Evolution has proposed that broadband providers send usage data for external analysis in order to prove that a small number of 'excessive' users do cause performance issues for other users.
If it is shown that they do not in fact affect the performance of other users then the basis upon which broadband providers s in the UK base their fair and acceptable use policies will be undermined.
This has potential implications for the future marketing and advertising of unlimited broadband packages because providers may no longer be able to justifiably the restriction of bandwidth usage, on these grounds.
This in turn could lead to packages with fixed usage quotas becoming even more commonplace in future.
Broadband fair use
At present the fair and acceptable use policies employed by UK broadband providers vary greatly.
Currently, some broadband users are unhappy with the effect that fair and acceptable use policies can have on their connections. The policies are used, broadband providers say, to limit the effects that a small minority of 'excessive users' can have on the network as a whole.
In fact, critic's claim, they result in products advertised as 'unlimited' becoming severely limited at times.
Criticism is often levelled at ChooseISP who operate one of the most restrictive traffic management policies among UK broadband providers.
Whereas most ISPs operate a fair use policy during peak usage hours, roughly 5pm to 10pm, Virgin Media's policy defines peak hours as an 11 hour period stretching from 10am to 9pm with a one hour break at 3pm.
If users download or upload more than their allocated quota with these times then they are penalised by having their broadband speed cut by up to 75%.
For example, customers signed up to 'Broadband Size XL' will be allowed to download only 3500MB of data between 4 and 9pm, roughly equal to 2 hours of HD video, before facing a cut in speed from 20Mbps to 5Mbps.
Virgin Media say that this ensures "that the service doesn't get blocked up with people using more than their fair share."
Opponents argue that broadband customers paying for a 20Mbps connection with 'unlimited' downloads should be getting greater freedom to do as they please.
Does fair use have a future?
The recent growth in bandwidth consumption has happened as a result of small increases of data consumption by the majority of users rather than a minority.
Video on demand services in particular are responsible for much of this growth and this trend looks set to continue as more and more media is consumed via the Web.
This has caused some broadband providers to shift the delivery of on-demand content elsewhere.
Virgin Media offers BBC iPlayer via its TV platform and BT has teamed up with Google to develop a video delivery service which reduces the demands on provider's bandwidth by caching the content with the ISP.
However it is unlikely that these efforts will make much of an impact on total consumption.
Broadband providers will have to look at what they are doing and ensure the network is managed in a sensible manner instead of penalising their customers.
At present it seems that paying for a premium service gives you freedom to hog all you want.
Virgin Media's 50Mbps flagship broadband has no traffic management policy and as broadband gets faster 'broadband hogs' who currently fall foul of the situation hope this will become the norm.
