Bandwidth

Depending on the broadband service to which you have subscribed, you will have a 3Gb, 30Gb or 45Gb limit on your monthly peak time download capacity. If you exceed your limit during the month, there is a 1Gb courtesy zone, where your broadband speed is limited to 128kbps. If you use up your 1Gb courtesy zone, your browsing will be temporarily suspended, until you decide what you would like to do.

We will advise you before you reach the courtesy zone, so that you can decide what to do. Your monthly reset date may be only a few days away, so you may simply decide to be economical with your browsing and downloads until your bandwidth usage counter resets.

Peak time usage is 8am until midnight on weekdays. All other times are unmetered. If you are using high bandwidth applications such as BBC iPlayer and other media streaming services during peak times, this will very quickly eat into your allowance. If you are on the 3Gb per month service, and you would like to use media streaming services regularly, it would be best to upgrade to the 30Gb service, for a small monthly increase in cost.

Another option is to add a 10Gb top-up to your account, which rolls over to subsequent months and is used as necessary (ie it doesn't expire), which costs £20 plus VAT.

High bandwidth usage activities include file sharing and torrent downloads (P2P), and media streaming (eg BBC iPlayer). For example, a 1 hour show on BBC iPlayer would soak up around 700mb (3/4 of a gigabyte), on the SD service. If you're using BBC HD, this would be considerably more.